From:
The Jakarta Post
By Panca Nugraha and Oyos Saroso H.N., The Jakarta Post, Mataram, Bandarlampung
Customers of state electricity company PT PLN in West Nusa Tenggara (NTB) and Lampung protested the frequent blackouts in their areas, claiming they had led to significant losses.By Panca Nugraha and Oyos Saroso H.N., The Jakarta Post, Mataram, Bandarlampung
Law practitioners and non-governmental group activists, naming themselves the NTB Power Users Advocating Coalition, on Monday protested the worsening blackouts at the NTB PLN office in Mataram.
"Rotating blackouts often take place at random and PLN has never informed customers of the reasons behind this. This is what we're questioning," said forum coordinator Sudirman, during a public meeting with PLN officials in NTB.
He added that based on data gathered by the forum, blackouts occurred daily in a number of districts on Lombok during the daytime as well as at night.
He said the public had complained about the long duration of blackouts, which were between three and four hours.
In response to the protest, NTB branch PLN general manager Sofyan said PLN had to resort to rotating power outages in Lombok because it was not able to supply adequate power to customers, especially during peak-load periods.
Currently, it is only able to supply customers with 96 mega watts (MW) of power from its four diesel generators on Lombok, while power demands from its 360,000 customers on Lombok peaked at 106 MW.
"We are currently still in deficit of around 10 MW, which means we have to conduct rotating blackouts from 6 p.m. until midnight," he said.
Sofyan said to overcome the deficit, PLN was forced to conduct rotating blackouts. He said the rotating blackouts had previously been imposed once every two days but since early this month PLN had conducted blackouts once every three days.
Meanwhile, the frequent blackouts have disrupted people's daily activities in Lampung. Besides disrupting services at government offices and the private sector, the outages have threatened small-scale industries as they solely rely on power from the PLN.
Strategic and Policy Study centre director Aryanto urged the Lampung PLN to reimburse customers for unused power load costs during blackouts based on the loss due to the blackouts.
"The Lampung PLN should write off the load cost as compensation for customers' losses. PLN should also form an independent team to assess material loss incurred by consumers, such as damage to electrical appliances. As compensation, every PLN customer should be exempted from the power load costs," said Aryanto on Monday.
The power outages in Lampung have not only deprived users from the household sector but also the business sector and small-scale traders. Members of the public have been further disgruntled by the unclear blackout schedule, each lasting for more than eight hours per day.
Lampung chapter Indonesian Consumers Association chairman Subdrayani Moersalin urged PLN to optimize the role of the power interconnection network during the current power crisis and provide restitution to customers.
Lampung PLN general manager Mashar Kukuh Trihadi said the blackouts had taken place because a number of transmission units were not functioning and were undergoing the maintenance process.