The project is situated in Sani Zanskar village on Haftal nalla, a tributary of Zanskar River. Completed at a cost of rupees 422.05 lac the project was commissioned in 2006. Haftal has two Turbo Impulse turbines of 500 KW each. Shams Irfan report.
The estimated discharge required to run both turbines is 2.30 cumecs. The length of the covered water conductor is 1687 meters while the open part is 13222 meters.
The project is being taken up under RMU by for adding two more units of 500 KW capacity each, raising its capacity of 2 MW. The micro hydel scheme was conceived by the Power Development Department (PDD) in 1980 and the detailed project report was formulated in March 1984 by PDD’s civil investigation wing. The aim was to provide electricity to the people of Zanskar with a generation capacity of 4 x 500 KW totalling 2 MW. The work of the project was allotted in 1989 on turnkey basis and was supposed to be completed in 1997.
But because of a number of reasons including non-availability of funds and Kargil War the work on Haftal got delayed till 2002. It was only resumed in 2002 after Rural Electrification Corporation sanctioned loan for the project.
Like other hydel projects in Ladakh Haftal too remains available for nine months only as in winters the source Nallah is frozen. Both the units are presently operational. Since the area is not connected with a grid station, sudden faults and non-existence of control system at Sub-transmission level, causes technical snags in the turbines due to malfunctioning of governors. The project faces problems of procuring spares for obsolete governing system as it needs to be replaced with a modern Electronic Governing System. In 2010-11 Haftal generated a total of 12.166 Lac units and improved it to 13.54 lac units in 2011-12.
SERC has put its cost at Rs 16.59 crore as its energy is as expensive as Rs 5.19 per unit.
