Home ›› 09 Mar 2023 ›› Asia Biz
India faces a high risk of nighttime power cuts this summer and in coming years, as delays in adding new coal-fired and hydropower capacity could limit the country’s ability to address surging electricity demand when solar energy is not available.
A rapid addition of solar farms has helped India avert daytime supply gaps, but a shortage of coal-fired and hydropower capacity risks exposing millions to widespread outages at night, government data and internal documents reviewed by Reuters show, reports Reuters.
India’s power availability in “non-solar hours” this April is expected to be 1.7per cent lower than peak demand - a measure of the maximum electricity requirement over any given time, an internal note by the federal grid regulator reviewed by Reuters showed.
April nighttime peak demand is expected to hit 217 gigawatts (GW), up 6.4per cent on the highest nighttime levels recorded in April last year.
“The situation is a little stressed,” Grid Controller of India Ltd (Grid-India) said in the note dated Feb. 3.
While Indians looking to beat the heat this summer will want steady power for their air-conditioners, night time outage risks threaten industries that operate around the clock, including auto, electronics, steel bar and fertiliser manufacturing plants.
“If there is a power cut even for one minute, paper pulp gets blocked and messes up the delicate process and causes hundreds of thousands of rupees in losses,” said P.G. Mukundan Nair, former chief of an Indian paper industry body who has been in paper manufacturing for nearly three decades. “Even the smallest interruption in power supply will create havoc,” Nair said.
The electricity deficits this summer could be worse than expected, as Grid-India’s shortage forecasts were made weeks before India’s weather office predicted heat waves between March and May.
India’s federal power secretary Alok Kumar downplayed concerns, saying the government had taken “all steps” to avoid power cuts.
“We are making capacity available to all states at competitive rates,” Kumar told Reuters.
After the Grid-India report, the government brought forward maintenance at some coal-fired power plants and secured extra gas-fired capacity to run to try to avert outages, another senior government official said.
As much as 189.2 GW of coal-fired capacity is expected to be available this April, according to Grid-India’s February note. That would be up more than 11per cent from last year, according to Reuters calculations based on Grid-India data.
Together, coal, nuclear and gas capacity are expected to meet about 83per cent of peak demand at night.
Hydro power will be crucial not only to meet much of the remaining supply but also as a flexible generator, as coal-fired plants cannot be ramped up and down quickly to address variability in demand.
Widening demand-supply fault lines Hydro power will be crucial as a flexible generator, as coal-fired plants cannot be ramped up and down quickly
Widening demand-supply fault lines Hydro power will be crucial as a flexible generator, as coal-fired plants cannot be ramped up and down quickly.
