The Appellate Tribunal for Electricity in its Judgment dated 29.01.2024 in Appeal No. 111 of 2020 titled as “Kanchanjunga Power Company Private Limited v. Central Electricity Regulatory Commission and Ors.”, inter alia ruled that merely being connected to an ISTS does not confer ISTS status on an otherwise Intra State system.
The issue arose on the certification by the Northern Regional Power Committee that the line in question was primarily used for intra-state power and not for inter-state transfer.
The Appellate Tribunal, while upholding the judgment of the CERC has held that the decision of the NRPC is as a delegatee of the CERC, as provided for in the Regulations. The decision of a delegatee cannot be subject matter of dispute before the delegator, who has no power to reverse or modify the decision of the delegatee.
There was no restriction on NRPC to decide the percentage of flow for certification of a transmission line as ISTS. NRPC was free to prepare and follow a criteria to certify a transmission line as ISTS and applied the same uniformly to all the intra-state lines seeking certification of being ISTS.
Further, the Appellate Tribunal has held that since the Indian Power System operates as a meshed network consisting of both intra-state and ISTS, at some point or the other, every intra-state system would be incidental to ISTS. Therefore, if intra-state systems being incidental to ISTS automatically gets classified as ISTS then all the intra-state systems would become ISTS.
The entire judgment can be read here
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