Second wind

India’s renewable energy journey, which had a humble start in the 1970s, has been nothing if not eventful. During these four decades, the country has covered many milestones and the sector has set its sight on a goal of 175 GW renewables-based electricity by 2022.

Still, the sector faces several challenges, chief among are the conventional ones — power evacuation, power absorption, and land provision.

Power evacuation, or lack of it, affects renewable energy power generation in two ways. First, all these generation plants, situated in far flung areas, have to have access to transmission lines so that whatever electricity they generate can be evacuated and transported to consumers. Our transmission network must be enlarged and strengthened to absorb much larger quantum of electricity.

Taking it to them Then, there is the case of inter-State transmission. One of the main premises of going in for such large-scale exploitation of renewable energy is that renewable resource-deficit states can take benefit of power generated in renewable resource-rich States that may have surplus power.

Here lies a big bottleneck. Power generators located in the eastern part of the country have not been to sell their electricity to north India due to severe congestion in the transmission grid.

Though the Centre has started ‘green energy corridors’ project besides giving final touches to a 20-year plan for the transmission sector, pace of actual implementation of such plans would determine how fast we can move towards our renewable energy goal.

The other point of concern pertains to the ultimate off-taker of renewable electricity, which is the distribution utility (discom) in majority of the cases. Almost all of our discoms are in very bad shape financially. The Ministry of Power estimates that accumulated losses of State discoms stood at .₹1.9 lakh crore in 2012.

No wonder that the discoms are reluctant to buy even conventional electricity despite existing demand. They would rather resort to load shedding than increase losses by supplying power.

Land and other worries In such a scenario, their unwillingness to buy relatively expensive renewable electricity, which is intermittent in nature, is not too difficult to understand.

Unless the issues plaguing their financial health are addressed through measures such as sectoral reforms and transparent tariff-setting, meeting renewable power obligations and timely payment to renewable power generators will remain a challenge. One of the key reasons for the Renewable Energy Certificates market not picking up can also be traced back to this basic problem.

However, it is incorrect to project that with the kinds of goals we have, the price of electricity to the consumer would become prohibitive. Several estimates show that the impact of the increasing share of renewable electricity would be marginal overall. Nonetheless, consumer tariffs must be reflective of that.

Given that solar and wind energy projects are land-intensive, albeit requiring non-productive land, the fate and contours of the land acquisition Act would have far reaching implications on such projects. With the government encouraging large wind farms and ultra-megawatt solar power projects, timely availability of land at reasonable prices becomes crucial.

Thus, the success in renewable energy field is very much dependent on the effectiveness of measures initiated to unblock these conventional and chronic bottlenecks.

The writer is senior fellow at the department of energy and environment, TERI University

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