India Faces up to Its Failing Grid

By Rachana Raizada, Contributor
January 1, 2013  

Will India's recent blackout prompt a shift from talk about the nation's renewable energy potential to action? What is being done, and what is planned?

 

Milan, Italy -- In contrast to the explosive global media coverage of the failures of three of India's five regional grids that left almost 700 million people without electricity, the publication of the Enquiry Committee's Grid Disturbance report lit few fuses. It attributed the failure to a combination of climatic conditions with weak inter-regional transmission corridors due to multiple outages, the high loading and eventual loss of one link, and overdrawals by Northern Region utilities. Among an extensive list of technical and administrative recommendations, the report suggests applying the penal provisions of the Electricity Act.

But with load shedding schedules already dictating daily routines across large swathes of the country, the nation’s loss of face hurt more than the lost power. In fact, many corporate operations were unaffected, as they own generation facilities to insulate themselves from just such events. Annual energy conservation reports - obligatory among energy-intensive industries - reveal that Tata Steel generated 30% of its electricity. Costs ranged from Rs3.88 (US$0.07)/kWh for purchased electricity to Rs2.41 ($0.04)/kWh for steam turbine/generator (95% using by-product gases) and Rs37.49 ($0.68)/kWh for diesel generation. For energy-intensive industries with limited cogen possibilities, renewables offer an attractive alternative to the diesel gensets used for backup power to redress the country’s power supply/demand imbalance.

The Current Energy Balance

According to the latest available figures from its Central Statistics Office, India had almost 207 GW of installed capacity by March 2011, 64% from thermal generation and non-hydro renewables. Large-scale hydropower accounted for 18.2% and ‘self-generation’ for 16%. While India is the world’s third largest coal producer, producing 7.5% of the global total in 2010, it’s also the world’s fourth largest net importer of coal and crude oil.

For example, the nation’s domestic steel industry has had to import high quality coking coal to meet its energy needs. Large industrial consumers (the so-called ‘high-tension’ segment) have been hard hit by rising energy prices which have raised the prices of their products in export markets. The country’s sustained growth places enormous demands on scarce energy resources with peak deficits for electricity in the 12% range. With improvements in living standards, per capita energy consumption in India increased from 1204 KWh in 1970-1971 to 4816 KWh in 2010-2011.