Smart solutions

The power sector in India has been experiencing continuous pressure in bridging the demand and supply gap. The gap has been increasing due to challenges in the availability of good quality coal — close to 60 per cent of the 240GW installed capacity of country’s power is met by this fuel.

Concern for the environment in the context of global warming has taken a front seat and the pressure on power project developers with delayed environment clearances have drastically delayed the projects. Aggregated technical and commercial loss by any standard is far from the best across the world; in fact the loss is in the range of 25 per cent to 40 per cent depending on which part of the country you are in.

The lack of concerted efforts to educate the public about energy conservation is also a challenge. The US spends close to $100 million in educating youngsters about renewable energy. India needs to progressively implement such initiatives. We deal with one-hour power cuts in a city like Bengaluru; we can only imagine the situation in other parts of the country.

The issue, however, is the reputation of the utilities both in terms of financial health and project execution. Most power utilities, barring some central and State utilities, have to deal with these issues and are facing challenging times.

Our “say-to-do ratio” (what we commit versus what we execute) is so bad that it puts off the both domestic and international investor sentiments from investing.

In a country of 1.2 billion people, there exist many opportunities. One such opportunity is capacity enhancement. The demand and supply gap is still close to 10 per cent. When quality electricity is made available, manufacturing gets revived, agro industries get pushed, and the storage of agro products gets importance, demand could surely grow.

India’s per capita consumption is still only about a third of what it is in developed nations. This calls for capacity enhancements on a large scale. Ultra mega power plants, PV solar plants, hydro power plants, wind energy systems and so on are all needed.

Efficiency improvements in transmission and distribution networks are also long-pending. We need to move beyond automatic meter reading.

Smart grids have been discussed for too long and we are already late. Focused efforts are required for seamless integration and for addressing the complete value chain (from generation to end consumer).

The ambitious smart cities initiative also requires a better power scenario. For a city to be smart, the power situation has to be smart. The next important step would be to ensure adequate water supply. Power and water are both deal-makers and breakers. Thus smart grids are indeed an immediate need.

I would also advocate demand side management and differential tariff for bringing about discipline in the usage of electricity. This would also make integration of renewable energy into the grid easier.

Micro grids (both DC and AC islanded) could be the way to reach remote places in India to facilitate inclusive development. These pose little or no technical challenges. All we need are policy changes and willingness to improve our approach to aid inclusive growth.

India announced the ambitious Power for All by 2012 — this is still a distant dream. We really do need to work on our say-to-do ratio and make power available to the nearly 300 million people who are still without it.

The writer is the chairman of the IET India Power Panel