Minister orders fast-track completion of substations to strengthen power supply

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Energy Minister Gottipati Ravi Kumar chairing a review meeting at the Secretariat on Wednesday.

Energy Minister Gottipati Ravi Kumar has directed the officials to expedite completion of the power substations under construction across the State, emphasising that they are crucial to sort out power interruptions and low-voltage issues.

Addressing a review meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Ravi Kumar announced that the government planned to introduce an underground cabling system to ensure uninterrupted power supply to critical and emergency service sectors.

He told the officials to take special measures to ensure continuous power supply to the government hospitals so that patients did not face inconvenience during outages, and to examine the performance of the generators in the nearly 30 major hospitals across the State so that switch-over issues due to power failures could be avoided.

APCPDCL CMD P. Pulla Reddy, AP-Transco Joint Managing Director G. Surya Sai Praveenchand, Directors, and senior officials of the Energy Department took part.

In a separate review, Special Chief Secretary K. Vijayanand said the government prepared a future-ready power transmission roadmap to support the rapidly expanding data centre ecosystem in and around Visakhapatnam, which emerged as a preferred destination for global technology companies and infrastructure developers keen on establishing hyperscale data centres, Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure, cloud computing facilities, and next-generation digital services.

The plan includes development of a 765kV, 400kV, and 220kV transmission network connecting key substations at Pendurthi, Maradam, Palasa, Achyutapuram, Padmanabham and Makavaripalem, designed to support more than 15 GW of data centre load by 2034 with a scope for further expansion.

He stated that the Visakhapatnam region had already attracted investment proposals from several prominent national and international companies, including Google, Reliance, Tata Consultancy Services (Hype