India faces high power cut risks after years of coal, hydropower neglect

A rapid addition of solar farms has helped India avert daytime supply gaps, but a shortage of coal-fired and hydropower capacity risks exposing millions to widespread outages at night Topics

India faces a high risk of nighttime power cuts this summer and in coming years, as delays in adding new coal-fired and hydropower capacity could limit the country's ability to address surging electricity demand when solar energy is not available.

A rapid addition of solar farms has helped India avert daytime supply gaps, but a shortage of coal-fired and hydropower capacity risks exposing millions to widespread outages at night, government data and internal documents reviewed by Reuters show.

 

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

April nighttime peak demand is expected to hit 217 gigawatts (GW), up 6.4% on the highest nighttime levels recorded in April last year.

"The situation is a little stressed," Grid Controller of India Ltd (Grid-India) said in the note dated Feb. 3.

 

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While Indians looking to beat the heat this summer will want steady power for their air-conditioners, night time outage risks threaten industries that operate around the clock, including auto, electronics, steel bar and fertiliser manufacturing plants.

"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," said P.G. Mukundan Nair, former chief of an Indian paper industry body who has been in paper manufacturing for nearly three decades.

"Even the smallest interruption in power supply will create havoc," Nair said.

The electricity deficits this summer could be worse than expected, as Grid-India's shortage forecasts were made weeks before India's weather office predicted heat waves between March and May.