India’s peak power demand hours have shifted from evening to day time, according to Ghanshyam Prasad, Chairperson, Central Electricity Authority (CEA).

The highest demand for this year, 223 GW (of capacity pressed into service, which occurred on June 9) happened at 3 pm, Prasad said, while speaking at an event on energy storage, at the 14th Clean Energy Ministerial Conference currently underway here.

Also read: Unseasonal rains impact. Peak power demand in June may not touch projected 229GW mark

Later, speaking to businessline, he said this was made possible by the ‘feeder separation’ exercise, under which separate cables carry power from solar plants to agricultural farms. Because of feeder separation, the agriculture load has shifted to day time, during solar hours, “which is very, very good” he said.

However, there is still demand for green power during non-solar hours — that is where energy storage has a play, he said.

The CEA had recently mandated that all the electricity distribution companies (discoms) should do “resource adequacy mapping”, to assess the demand for storage in the coming years. Alongside, the state and regional load despatch centres, would do a similar assessment exercise for one year. This would give a precise idea about the extent of storage capacity required.

On its part, the CEA, having made its own assessmen, believes that the storage requirement will jump up from 2026-27 onwards.

Accordingly, the CEA is trying to align its demand projection for storage to the demand projections for transmission. For example, in Ladakh, the plan is to build 13 GW of solar capacity, but the transmission infrastructure would be only for 5 GW — the rest would be handled by storage, Prasad said.

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