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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Grid stability is key -Aditya Vora & Armin Rosencranz

Grid stability is key -Aditya Vora & Armin Rosencranz

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published Published on Feb 24, 2018   modified Modified on Feb 24, 2018
-The Hindu

The ambitious plan to help farmers earn from solar power generation hinges on small details

Electricity is a major concern in rural India, especially for farmers. The Government of India has come up with an original plan to address this problem. Instead of transmitting electricity to the farmers, the government, to start with, wants farmers to use solar energy to power their irrigation pumps. According to the January 2018 report of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, there are about 142,000 solar pumps in India. The government is planning to install one million solar pumps by 2021.

Solar capacity

To achieve this, the Union Budget 2018 has allocated close to ?48,000 crore to set up the Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan (KUSUM). This programme will help set up more than 28 GW of combined solar capacity through these solar pumps. Additionally, to ensure optimal use of this solar energy, and to incentivise farmers to shift to renewable energy, the government plans to purchase the surplus power through electricity distribution companies. This proposal will almost certainly increase agricultural incomes and reduce electricity losses when transmitting power to remote rural areas. Analysts claim that losses from distribution could fall to about 12% from the current level of at least 23%. However, the feasibility of purchasing surplus solar power seems problematic. There is a need to address the issue of grid stability that this injection of surplus power is bound to create.

The advantage of this scheme is that transmission losses and power theft would drop significantly. Most rural retailers of power also lose money as they sell power at a subsidised rate to the poor and the farm sector. The state-run distribution companies were thus running a loss of ?4.3 trillion as of September 2015. Local generation of power in the manner proposed would take care of the above issues.

We believe the disadvantages currently outweigh the advantages because of the issue of grid stability. This is an issue that is often neglected. All power grids require balancing. This balancing entails meeting the demand with adequate supply 24x7 to ensure there is no blackout. The reason for striking this balance is that electrical energy cannot readily be stored, meaning that power generation ought to work round the clock. These electrical gridlines were created to depend on reliable and controllable generators (coal, oil and even hydroelectric). However, with more and more power being generated through fluctuating power generators (solar and wind), a more precise balance will have to be created, which may cause more failures.

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The Hindu, 24 February, 2018, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/grid-stability-is-key/article22838782.ece


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