Power planning: India's surging energy demand needs better preparation

A developing super El Niño has led to scorching temperatures across the Indian subcontinent, at least a month ahead of schedule. With Indians cranking up cooling equipment, parts of the country are experiencing large power outages. On May 22, electricity supply across the so-called Millennium City, Gurugram, was disrupted and the Rapid Metro service suspended for over an hour owing to a massive transformer fire. Set against surging national demand, which peaked at 270.8 Gw on May 21  — up from the 2025 peak of 242.49 Gw in sultry June — the government’s advisory to citizens to “use electricity wisely and judiciously” cannot be faulted. The problem is that such appeals are unlikely to work, mainly because citizens have few options. Given that, with or without the El Niño impact, summer temperatures hit new highs each year, a steady increase in power demand should have been anticipated.  

 

The past decade has been the warmest in India’s history. Every year, summers have arrived earlier and temperatures have scaled new peaks. Preparing for the inevitable demand surges, therefore, has become imperative. Yet, as the transformer fire in Gurugram demonstrated, infrastructure maintenance and upgrades are rarely carried out in advance (such as during the cooler weather). And, more to the point as India aspires for its net-zero target, the adoption of technological solutions to expand the availability of renewable power to bridge power deficits has been tardy. To be sure, India has come a long way from the dramatic north Indian grid failure of 2012, the world’s biggest blackout at the time. Since then, there has been a reorganisation of the grid architecture to ensure that overdrawing in any state does not trip the system. More recently, the railway, coal and power ministries collaborated to ensure that the distribution system for coal, the principal source of energy in India, was streamlined so that thermal-power stations could replenish their stocks in time. These improvements have certainly reduced the chances of a nationwide collapse. 

But the government’s advisory suggests that a crisis is brewing even as the meteorological department predicts a prolonged heatwave. This too could have been avoided, had renewable energy been in a position to shoulder more of the load, though renewable power is playing a notably larger role in meeting and absorbing daytime peaks between 2 pm and 4 pm, when maximum demand coincides with the bright sunshine, enabling solar power to bridge the deficit. Together with wind and hydropower, solar accounts for about a third of total peak power in the daytime. The problem begins after sunset, when another, smaller residential peak occurs, for which thermal power takes the brunt. Soaring demand has made meeting this night-time requirement increasingly challenging. While pumped hydro storage systems can partially bridge this gap, they have limited utility. It is increasingly obvious that solar-power generators need to acquire battery storage systems at scale. Since 2021, the Centre has provided a slew of incentives to establish battery manufacturing capacity, but progress has been snail-paced. India’s continuing reliance on China for raw materials has complicated the process. These longstanding structural issues need to be sorted out quickly, since no amount of judicious use will bridge India’s burgeoning power demand in the foreseeable future.