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Based on a suggestion from the Tamil Nadu government, the Union Power Ministry will constitute a committee to look into issues related to integrating renewable energy into the grid, a senior state government official has said.
There was a record evacuation of wind energy in Tamil Nadu last year, contributing to over 40 per cent of the grid capacity. While that was heartening, it had its own downside and challenges of integrating renewable energy into the grid, according to Rajeev Ranjan, Additional Chief Secretary (Energy), Tamil Nadu.
ChallengesTamil Nadu being a pioneer in wind energy has its own problems and challenges in making the grid stable. There are technical aspects as to how much renewable energy can be absorbed into the grid without disturbances, he said at the CII’s second edition of Tamil Nadu Renewable Energy Conference – Fostering Investment in Tamil Nadu.
The state load dispatch centre is facing difficulty in managing the grid because of fluctuatitons in wind power generation. “We need to back down lot of conventional sources of power,” said Ranjan.
“We don’t want to get into a situation when the grid becomes unstable because of huge amount of wind energy that is coming in. I raised this issue in the recently held energy ministers’ conference in Vadodara. Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal realised that this issue needs to be resolved,” he said.
Goyal said a committee will look into all these issues. It will examine how the integration of infirm wind energy should be managed because frequent backdown of thermal units could lead to failure of boilers.
This year, Tamil Nadu did over 10,000 million units of wind energy absorption and had to regularly ‘back down’ base load generators to almost to capacity of 1,000 MW. This is over the planned shutdown of thermal and hydro power generation, he said.
Grid management issue is critical because wind season is between June and September when the problem is very acute.
“Before the next season, we need to revisit some of the rules and regulations. The present system is discriminatory for making very high percentage of wind energy absorption,” he said.
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