 "The power ministry is working with discoms, regulators, and technology companies to roll out the IES blueprint, which will ultimately be implemented nationwide")
As with some other critical sectors, such as insurance, healthcare and ecommerce, the government is steaming ahead with a digital initiative that that hopes to restructure the energy sector and streamline its functioning.
The so-called India Energy Stack (IES) has been envisioned as a tech backbone that will allow stakeholders in the power sector to seamlessly exchange data to enable next-generation reforms, More importantly, it will also offer consumers unprecedented access to a much wider market, should , while also allowing consumers at the retail level to get access to the market in new ways - from ease of selling power through solar rooftops to other users in the grid, trading excess power in the open market through aggregators, using real-time intelligence from their smart meters to manage time-of-day usage, and even access to modern billing applications.
For power distribution companies, or discoms, the national Utility Intelligence Platform (UIP) - which is set to be commissioned within a year as a pilot under IES - will allow development of data analytics tools for critical interventions, including revenue protection in high loss areas, peer-to-peer energy trading, and outage management, among others.
Digital reform for a complex sector
The IES initiative is being driven by a high-level task force mentored by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani - who helped create foundational digital platforms like India Stack, which includes Aadhaar and UPI, and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) - and chaired by R S Sharma, former Mission Director of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).
The power ministry is currently working with discoms, regulators, and technology companies to ultimately roll out the IES blueprint, which will ultimately be implemented nationwide. The UIP pilot, which is currently in the works, will cover the technology platforms of power utilities across states and is likely to be completed by 2026.
"The pilot is basically a Utility Intelligence Platform (UIP) for the distribution sector. We have devoted the first three months to the development of the proof of concept, and we are currently building its architecture, including the standards for the utilities to mount data etc.," said a senior official from the Ministry of Power, who declined to be identified. "The broad idea is to demonstrate interoperability and data-driven innovation. based on the architecture, the UIP will be designed, and after that a large-scale model will be developed for the entire sector or the nation."
Systemic overhaul
The Indian power system is going through a fundamental and drastic shift in terms of the flow of data and information. Conventionally, power used to flow from power plants to consumers through transmission lines and distribution transformers but now consumers are also producing their own solar power on rooftops, power generation has been decentralised through schemes like PM-KUSUM, and smart devices like smart meters, SCADA systems, and electric vehicles have also been plugged into the system.
Managing this new and complex power system efficiently will necessitate efficient use of huge amounts of data that will come from multiple devices belonging to legacy systems. The IES, once it is ready, will add a data layer connecting these systems. This is similar to Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India's real-time interbank mobile payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which integrate IT systems of different banks with millions of consumer accounts, and has revolutionised the digital payments ecosystem.
"IES attempts to harmonise the data structures going forward so that it is easily available and interoperable and it can be used by different application systems at different levels. It also intends to create enablers for using data from different legacy systems," former power secretary Alok Kumar, who is a member of the high level task force on IES, told Business Standard.
"The intervention will enable the use of data from large existing and prospective devices in an efficient manner for various applications in the power system to make its operation and planning optimum and efficient," he said.
Multiple use-cases in the works
Market creation will be among the key application areas for IES, he added, whether through P2P trading or allowing consumers to bid on exchanges. These will require authentic and real-time data on location of devices and the direction of electricity flow, among other parameters, to ensure transactions are not disputed.
Another major area of change is how the system reacts to demand patterns. Under IES, the intelligent grid will decode consumer behaviour to detect load changes; this will also require communicating electricity prices to the consumers in real-time so that they can change their load patterns and benefit from low tariffs, while discoms get the information they need for load monitoring. Enabling this demand response from consumers will require humongous packets of data and information to flow at the consumer-to-consumer level, something that does not happen currently. Similarly, given the increasing complexity of power generation and supply sources, discoms will need to focus on demand forecasting, power procurement, and network expansion planning well in advance.
Grid operation are another key area for IES, since transmission utilities and system operators will require modern systems to manage energy storage and battery devices on the grid, which will impact dispatch and scheduling.
Gigantic increase in numbers likely
Given the overhaul of fundamental operations, the numbers are also set to increase exponentially. For instance, the total number of participants at power exchanges, which is currently between 7,000 and 8,000, is projected to rise to millions once consumers start buying and selling power actively.
"This is just one example of how the number of players in the power sector and the complexity level is going to increase exponentially in the near term. That is the basic problem statement, which IES seeks to address. Ultimately, we want to prepare the Indian power system for the modern and complex applications that are currently already happening in the global power markets," Kumar said.
For the power sector, this technological revamp under IES follows a spate of regulatory reforms implemented over the past few years which have already unclogged many of its traditional bottlenecks. The implementation of the Late Payment Surcharge (LPSC) Rules since 2022 has helped bring down discoms' losses, while the Electricity (Right of Consumers) Rules, 2020, provides for consumers to demand quality service from discoms. If successful, the IES pilot, the Utility Intelligence Platform, will pave the way for a major overhaul of the power sector, with the possibility of replicating key interventions across the entire energy spectrum.
