Alarm bells as heatwave pushes up peak demand, Power Ministry asks utilities to be on high alert

Over the last one month, the northern region has been witnessing a record demand due to the prevailing heat conditions.

AMIDST A sweltering heatwave and an expected surge in agricultural load by end-June, a key body of power engineers employed across state and central utilities, on Monday flagged the possibility of a grid outage in Punjab that could have a cascading impact on the country’s grid, and also warned that an imminent surge in demand “may lead to an unmanageable power situation”.

Over the last one month, the northern region has been witnessing a record demand due to the prevailing heat conditions. On Monday, it touched the highest-ever peak demand of 89 giga watt (1 GW is 1,000 mega watts), which was successfully met. But such high demand has led to power supply cuts in Lucknow and Meerut, and also impacted passenger services in Delhi international airport Monday afternoon after a “significant voltage spike in the grid, reportedly due to the tripping of a 765KV line”.

While a surge in domestic consumption load in the country’s northern parts are behind the shortages, the Ministry of Power spokesperson told The Indian Express, “All utilities have been advised to maintain a state of high alert and minimise forced outage of equipment.” To meet demand, the Northern Region is also importing 25-30 per cent of its power requirement from the neighbouring regions, the spokesperson said.
The current crisis situation also brings back into focus some of the lingering structural issues. A growing demand-supply mismatch in India’s power market, triggered by a slowdown in the pace of new capacity addition of coal-fired power plants coupled with the lack of effective storage options for renewable power has kept the country’s grid managers on their toes over the last three summers. With soaring temperatures leading to a surge in power demand, the failure to augment baseload capacity is progressively exposing the structural issues posed by the variability of renewable energy.

With renewables, electricity is generated only when the sun shines or when the wind blows, which is not always in sync with the demand cycle. As renewables grow to become a big chunk of the installed generation capacity, till the time that viable storage options are developed, the grid has no option but to fall back on thermal or nuclear for base load capacity. Consequently, stepping up thermal, especially coal, and nuclear generation, is the only way forward till the issue of intermittency in RE (renewable energy) generation is solved.