Photo by Neelkamal Deka on Unsplash
India’s National Electricity Plan in 2018 projected adding more than 45 GW of coal-fired capacity by 2027, and Central Electricity Authority (CEA) showed that in 2029-30 India’s coal capacity will increase by 64 GW above 2021 levels. This will increase emissions, and risk stranded assets. India’s reliance on coal was one of the driving factors behind its commitment to only phase down, not phase out, coal at COP26.
Investments in renewable energy cost money. India already has the fifth largest installed capacity of renewable energy in the world, but additional investments will need significant finance. One relatively low-cost of saving energy is a subject that has not had much focus in India – reducing energy losses.
According to the CEA, India suffers transmission and distribution losses of around 20%. While this figure has been declining consistently since 2000, it is still more than twice the world average.
This is important in a stressed power sector because cash-strapped discoms find it difficult to make timely payments to gencos. The losses are due to technical reasons, like the resistance of cables and equipment as electricity passes through, but also factors engineers cannot readily address, such as pilferage, collection inefficiency, defective meters and errors in meter reading.
If energy efficiency is improved, India would need to generate less energy to reach its intended customers.
It will save the Indian government money, assist cash-strapped discoms and lead to more reliable electricity for consumers. It will further facilitate the integration of renewables by reducing the amount lost between generation and end use.
In October 2021, India faced facing a large-scale power outage with coal reserves enough only for a few days. This came as the result of a surge in power usage during the pandemic and the sharp increase in global coal prices.
As a result, power cuts became more frequent than they had been at the same time last year. Jharkhand, Bihar and Rajasthan were some of the worst affected states according to daily load dispatch data from the federal grid regulator POSOCO. For example, Jharkhand suffered a power deficit of 18-24%, causing power outages for many hours in a day in most of these states.
One British company is now looking to help India with this problem, following successful trials in Saudi Arabia and South Africa which have demonstrated up to 30% increase in current carrying capacity with over two years of field data.
As electricity lines operate, they get hot, both from the current running through them and incoming solar radiation. The hotter the line, the less efficient the line is due to increased electrical resistance. Lines are also thermally limited in how much power they can carry, so cooling them down increases the power transfer capacity. Leeds-based AssetCool produces a photonic inorganic coating which cools overhead lines. The coating lowers electrical resistance, which cuts power losses, reduces carbon emissions, allows more current to be carried on the line. It is suited for new power lines that are laid, but also have an application for retro-fitting existing lines.
Alternatives to this technology exist in the form of replacing existing power lines with newer, better specification ones, but doing so would be significantly more expensive.
If technical losses in best-performing transmission systems in India are around 3-4% of electricity produced, and the overhead line losses around half of this, even saving 5% of the energy losses across India’s total annual electricity production 1,380,000 gWh would result in a saving of Rs 240 crores a year (US$32m) for transmission companies. If generation losses are around five times those of transmission at, say, 8%, and such technology can prevent their conductor losses, generation companies could save around 300 crore gWh/year of energy.
India is perhaps one of the most exciting markets in the world for exploring such a technology, because of its climate, high energy losses and the size of the country.
Climate change is not a national problem but a global one. Developing countries led by India and China successfully argued at COP26 that rich countries are responsible for most of today’s climate change impacts since they started emitting carbon much earlier than the rest of the world. Innovative IP from abroad such as this is one way that truly global solutions can be found to global problems.
About the Author
Pratik Dattani is Managing Director of market entry advisory firm EPG Economic and Strategy Consulting with a focus on cleantech and sits on the Board of think tank Bridge India.
