For the economic development of any country, power is a basic need. The availability of electricity has been the most powerful tool to drive economic and social change around the world. Improvement in the standard of living of the people, and an increase in productivity in industry, and agriculture basically depend on an adequate supply of electricity. Mainly, the generation, transmission, and distribution of electrical energy have been the major components of the national planning process.
Mainly, generating stations and distribution systems are connected through transmission lines, which connect the power of one system to another. whereas the distribution system connects all the loads in a particular area to the transmission line. The transmission system of an area is called the grid. The various grids are interconnected through tie lines to form a regional grid, and the different regional grids are interconnected to form a national grid. Power is transmitted from one grid to another through lines with certain losses of generation.
In Nepal, NEA has hydroelectric plants connected to the grid with a capacity of 480 Megawatts. It also buys power from Independent Power Producers (IPP) with a capacity of 230 Megawatts. It operates two fuel-operated plants that generate 53 Megawatts of Electricity. The total capacity of the Integrated Nepal Power System (INPS), which NEA operates, stands at 757 Megawatts. The voltages used for the distribution are 11, 6.6, and 3.3 kV for primary distribution and 230 volts for secondary distribution.
The electrical energy is normally generated at power stations, which are far from the consumers. So the bulk of the power is to be transmitted from the generating station to the consumer, which is more economical and involves different techniques of transmission and different equipment.