India In for More Night-time Power Cuts Due to Coal, Hydro Power Neglect | Weather.com - The Weather Channel

India In for More Night-time Power Cuts Due to Coal, Hydro Power Neglect | Weather.com
The premature, countrywide rise in temperatures during February and March suggests India may well be in for a particularly cruel summer. And as it happens, many Indians could spend their nights tossing and turning in their beds or hand-fanning themselves to stave off the unbearable heat.

A grim new analysis of India's power crisis published by Reuters suggests that a lot of households in the country might spend this summer (and the ones in the future!) in the dark.

India's response to the surging electricity demands has been the rapid addition of solar farms, which has allowed it to avert any daytime supply gaps until now. But this measure brings to mind that meme where a man slaps a piece of tape onto a leaking water tank.

There seems to be a lack of foresight in addressing how the problem could be dealt with at night — when solar energy is unavailable. And the new report highlights how India faces a high risk of nighttime power cuts owing to negligence in adding new coal-fired and hydropower capacity.

An internal note by the federal grid regulator shows that India's power availability in "non-solar hours" is likely to be 1.7% lower than peak demand, a measure of the maximum electricity requirement over any given time, this April.

Next month's nighttime peak demand is predicted to hit 217 gigawatts — 6.4% greater than the highest nighttime levels recorded in April last year.

But if you're only fretting about being unable to run your air conditioners at night, let us paint a bigger picture for you. All the industries that run round the clock, such as electronics, steel bars and fertiliser manufacturing plants, will also take a hit.

"If there is a power cut even for one minute, paper pulp gets blocked and messes up the delicate process and causes hundreds of thousands of rupees in losses," P.G. Mukundan Nair, former chief of an Indian paper industry body who has been in paper manufacturing for nearly three decades, told Reuters.

Certain government officials seem to be throwing a blanket over the matter as well. Alok Kumar, India's federal power secretary, said that the government had taken all steps to avoid power cuts and was making capacity available to all states at competitive rates.

However, according to Reuters calculations based on Grid-India data, coal, nuclear and gas capacity are expected to meet only about 83% of peak demand at night.

Meanwhile, it is crucial to generate more hydropower not only to meet much of the remaining supply but also as a flexible generator, as coal-fired plants cannot be ramped up and down quickly to address variability in demand.

There has been a lot of friction from locals over ongoing hydro and nuclear power projects due to concerns over environmental costs, legal challenges over land acquisition, labour availability, etc.

Coal capacity also needs to be increased to address the widening demand-supply fault lines and avert power outages in the future. The construction of more than 20 coal-fired units with 16.8 GW capacity has been delayed over a year, with some plants facing decade-long delays, data from the Central Electricity Authority shows.

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