Rahul Mangaonkar | TNN

Ahmedabad : Mumbai might be the country’s financial capital, the city that never sleeps. But come peak summer every year, Mumbaikars starts losing sleep over power cuts and load shedding. Two years back when Mumbai faced power cuts, Gujarat government seized the initiative and ran advertisements in Mumbai papers that proclaimed “The joy of having continu ous light”. Cheeky, but it did drive home the fact that Apnu Amdavad enjoys a 24 x 7 uninterrupted power supply. Very few cities, leave alone Mumbai, can boast of this. It is Ahmedabad’s USP, even if the city’s energy requirements are being fulfilled by local giant Torrent, that efficiently keeps Ahmedabad powered and running come rain or shine. Even this summer, Mumbai reported a shortfall of 200 to 400 MW during peak hours. But, in Ahmedabad, with demand peaking at 900 MW, the supply interruption was only about 0.2 % - giving power supply in the city a high reliability benchmark of 99.8%. With natural gas-fired power plants of 1130 MW scheduled to go into generation mode by 2008 and Gujarat government planning to double its existing capacity to 11,000 MW in the next five years, there would be sufficient power available to fuel the city’s dreams, even if there is a drastic increase in demand. The massive gas pipeline network laid down by the Adanis across the city is, in fact, coming in as competition to Torrent. Competition being always good for the market, the Amdavadi just needs to chill out during the long summer months while the world sweats it out.