Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (APTEL): A Coram of Justice Manjula Chellur (Chairperson) and S.D. Dubey, (Technical Member) allowed an appeal filed against an impugned order passed by the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission.
The counsel for the appellant Anand K. Ganesan, Swapna Seshadri, Ashwin Ramanathan and Utkarsh Singh had submitted that in 2011 the transmission system in issue was not required for the Applicant/Appellant in view of the Appellant being unable to obtain the Consent for Establishment (CFE) from the Pollution Control Board. This non-issuance of the CFE was beyond the control of the Applicant/Appellant and therefore a force majeure under the Bulk Power Transmission Agreement was entered into between the parties and further a petition had been filed before the Central Commission seeking directions on the declaration of force majeure and also return on the bank guarantee retained by Powergrid. The Central commission had disposed of the petition holding that the Applicant/Appellant had acted bona fide aggrieved by which the Applicant/Appellant had preferred an appeal which was pending before this tribunal and they further submitted that the delay was not deliberate but on bona fide reasons.
The Tribunal while allowing the appeal condoned the delay of 148 days and found that the reasoning assigned in the application explaining the delay in filing the Appeal was satisfactory. [PEL Power Ltd. v. CERC, 2019 SCC OnLine APTEL 115, decided on 19-12-2019]
