Airline companies don’t consider peak demand when planning capacity, and neither do telecom companies. They factor in some unmet demand during Christmas and New Year, for instance. The one sector which cannot afford this indulgence is the power sector, simply because peak demand is an everyday fact, and lasts for a good few hours. This demand has to be met. Putting up a power plant to meet peak demand, however, is an expensive proposition as it will run only for those few hours when demand spikes. The trick then is to moderate the spike to ensure that the power demand curve is as close to a constant as possible — what industry insiders refer to as “flattening of the load curve”.
One simple way to flatten the curve is by disincentivising power consumption during peak hours and incentivising it during non-peak hours. Developed countries have managed to work out an incentive/disincentive scheme right down to the household level. Though more than a dozen states in India have introduced what is known as time-of-day tariffing (involving rebates of 5-15 per cent for usage of off-peak power and a 15-20 per cent premium for usage during peak hours), this is limited to heavy load industrial users.
Alok Kumar, secretary at the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC), admits that demand management of this sort has not received due attention here. That is partly because in addition to a peak shortage of almost 16 per cent, the country also faces a general energy shortfall of over 11 per cent. Such a scenario is hardly conducive to a load-shifting policy as there is always a shortage. However, since the energy deficit will be wiped out at some stage, it is not too early to start planning for lower peak shortages.
Another area in the power sector which needs urgent attention and action is the power transmission matrix. The daily near-misses that the country’s transmission grid witnesses have assumed alarming proportions — thanks to states like Delhi, Maharashtra, Kerala, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh regularly overdrawing power from the grid.
The key to grid stability lies in the unglamorous load despatch centres. What the air traffic controller does for aviation, the so-called load despatch centres do for the power sector. There are 33 of these at the state level, five at the regional level and one at the national level. These centres take power — station by station — and transport it through the transmission network while ensuring that no single line gets overloaded and that the frequency of the grid does not touch danger levels (sub-49 hertz frequency).
When I went to meet the head of the Delhi state load dispatch centre, General Manager Ashok K Kaul, the digital frequency meter installed prominently on his office wall came close to the danger mark (read near-miss) at least twice in the hour that I spent with him, due to overdrawal of power.
The grid frequency on September 9, for example, was in sub-optimal territory (below 49.5 Hz) through the day and was below the critical mark (of 49 Hz) for over half the day. Not surprisingly, in a letter the subsequent day, the country’s nodal transmission agency, Power Grid Corporation of India, warned that such instances are “extremely detrimental to grid safety and security and … may result in major contingency/disintegration of the grid”.
The root of the problem is that the load dispatch centres, which have been carved out of the erstwhile electricity boards, function as part of the state utility setup rather than as independent grid managers that work in a fair, transparent, impartial and non-discriminatory manner. Their collusion with the state agencies is also one reason that open access has failed to take off. The CERC feels that the load dispatch centres are denying open access on flimsy and irrelevant grounds to ensure that power is not wheeled out of the state. Earlier this month, the Commission “summoned” the Rajasthan State Load Despatch Centre and its parent state transmission utility,Rajasthan Vidyut Prasaran Nigam Ltd, for denying open access to Gujarat Fluorochemicals Ltd in violation of regulations.
The solution is to provide autonomy to these load dispatch centres and “ring-fence” them from the rest of the power system, since these are also the agencies that execute the regulatory orders on the ground. The roadmap for this autonomy has been worked out by the Gireesh Pradhan committee which submitted its report to the government last month. The recommendations include ensuring independent revenue streams for these centres generated through a fee for services provided, along with accounting separation from the state transmission utility (or the electricity board).
If we want a mature power market in the country, this ring-fencing should be done at the earliest. We cannot have the policeman giving preferential right-of-way to some while ignoring others — and all this while endangering the grid.
