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.

Since March 2020, the country has added about 11,990 MW of thermal power, while renewables capacity addition has been well over 56,000 MW.

Peak shortages, which happen during certain hours of the day when loads increase, surged from 1.39 GW in 2018-19 to 8.65 GW in 2022-23, the year after demand crashed during the previous two years due to Covid-19. In 2023-24, it dropped to 3.34 GW due to a cooler than expected summer caused by unseasonal rainfall. While till April end, there has not been any peak demand shortage, data for May-June is not available.

This year, with peak demand remaining at around 250 GW amid sustained heat waves pushing up air conditioning load, the country’s grid managers are struggling to keep the grid balanced. Tripping of grid infrastructure at different locations across the country most likely due to increased drawal has further aggravated the situation.

In its letter to Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, the AIPEF chairman Shailendra Dubey, said, “While the situation of power availability and supply is becoming serious day by day, neither the government of India nor any state government has initiated steps to control the power demand. If the situation continues, there are fair chances of grid disturbance.”

Grid disturbances occur when one or more power system elements trip due to mismatch in demand and supply. Usually, grid disturbances lead to localised power outages but can also have a cascading effect on the entire grid.

The power ministry has taken several measures to ensure grid stability, including instructing imported coal-based thermal plants to operate at full capacity until October 15 and maintaining adequate coal stock. It also instructed idling gas-based thermal plants to remain operational until June-end and allowed the sale of surplus power produced from ‘linkage coal’ in the market, and said states can tie up power with other states having surplus capacity via PUShP (Portal for Utilisation of Surplus Power).

According to a retired official in the power ministry, it may not be possible for renewable power to plug the gap for declining thermal generation till the time viable storage options are developed. “The concept of renewables achieving grid-parity is proving to be a farce. If the cost of standby thermal power is taken into account, renewable power is now almost twice its cost on paper,” said the retired official, who was closely associated with the capacity addition plan.