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total of 8,133 gigawatt-hours worth of solar energy was lost in India in the quarter ending June this year, which was curtailed not because of lack of sunshine but because of the inability of the electricity grid to accommodate the energy produced by solar installations.
According to Minister of State for New and Renewable Energy Shripad Naik, the statistics were provided in a written answer to the questions raised in the Rajya Sabha.
The monthly data indicate that the situation becomes worse until the end of the quarter when it shows a slight improvement: 2,417 GWh in April, increasing to 3,235 GWh in May, and then reducing to 2,481 GWh in June.
The curtailment has been made intentionally in order to ensure the stability of the grid, according to the information provided by the ministry from the Grid Controller of India.
At the heart of the problem lies sequencing. Renewable energy installations in India have been deployed at a greater pace than the transmission capacity required to transport the electricity generated from these plants to end-use locations.
New renewable projects are often put in place before the transmission lines capable of transporting their electricity are ready, thus leaving grid planners with no option but to limit power generation during high-sunship times due to a mismatch in demand.
This is far from being an anecdotal observation. In its own independent assessment, energy think-tank Ember noted that just due to transmission limitations, some 300 GWh worth of renewable energy was lost during January-March this year in India, primarily coming from the Northern and Western regional grids, together accounting for most of the generation cuts. On the contrary, Southern region saw almost zero curtailments thanks to better synchronization between development of the power grid and generation facilities.
Rajasthan, India's leader in terms of solar and wind energy generation, has suffered disproportionately from all of this. Some 4 GW of renewable capacity in Rajasthan was curtailed, with the state association for solar industry calculating losses running to millions of dollars.
According to Ember, India has met only about 80 percent of its annual transmission targets in the last five years. Meanwhile, one in every four schemes for the Inter-State Transmission System is delayed for one year or more.
There are different reasons behind it: controversies about the right-of-way of the lines, the complex ownership of lands hampering the acquisition process, clearing of forests and biodiversity, and a narrow supply base of high voltage direct current technology required for power transmission.
In the future, the problem is likely to increase in scale. More than 20 GW of 45 GW of the renewables capacity coming online in the current financial year may suffer connectivity delay of over four months, of which more than 12 GW can be found in the state of Rajasthan.
In addition, there are 8 GW of solar and wind capacity in the western and southern regions suffering from the same exposure. It was defined as the biggest operational threat to the goal of achieving 500 GW of non-fossil power capacity in 2030 (up from approximately 288 GW now).
According to energy experts, the key fix lies in the shift in planning philosophy; moving away from the existing generation-led paradigm where power plants are installed before the transmission infrastructure, towards an integrated planning philosophy where the capacity for both generation and transmission is developed simultaneously.
On a short-term basis, batteries have been suggested as the solution. Storing any excess solar power that is generated during the day to use at a later time or using batteries to deliver transmission services in congested lines will cut down the number of units of energy that have to be wasted due to the lack of necessary transmission infrastructure.
The economics also support the argument; with world prices of gas currently well above pre-confrontation levels in light of the current confrontation between the United States, Israel and Iran, the power that was going waste could have cut India's import bill of expensive gas.
