PATIALA: All India Power Engineers Federation (AIPEF) welcomed UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath 's order to review of all long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) entered with power generation companies and demanded similar exercise must be done by other states.AIPEF demanded review of all long term PPAs made with private thermal and solar generators especially " deemed generation " clause which should be revoked. The state run thermal plants have been put on forced outage and the thermal power plants are not able to operate to their full capacity. The plant load factor of state run thermal plants is declining every year and generation cost increasing and this may be cited as a reason to dismantle these power houses.The State and, consequently, the electricity consumers are paying thousands of crores of rupees to the private power developers thus, even though the latter do not supply the energy they have guaranteed to the consumers.The underutilization of state owned thermal plants at the cost of private generators is putting unnecessary burden of thousands of crores on state power utilities as capacity charges. Punjab is paying over 2300 crore as capacity charges.Further states must plan supercritical thermal units before phasing out old thermal units with life of more than 25 years otherwise this would lead to destroying of planned growth of the power sector and leaving it to the mercy of private players and market forces.AIPEF is of firm view the government has no credible vision on long-term electricity planning, as evident from its senseless pursuit of adding thousands of MW of nuclear power generation capacity, when such base-load power generation would further add to the electricity costs and compound the consumers' woes. It is ironic that the political leaders are more interested in baling out a bankrupt US.

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