Chairman And MD Of NTPC Talks About The Readiness Of India's Renewable Space

Thank you.

Yeah, you have raised a very pertinent question. To increase the capacity of renewables, especially solar and wind, we would be requiring storage capacity, and this is essential to meet the peak requirement also. As more and more solar comes to the grid, there may be a situation where during the daytime you have surplus capacity, and during peak time when the sun sets, there is a constraint to meet the peak requirement because you will not be in a position to flex your thermal plants that fast. In most parts of the world, this is being achieved through combined cycle power projects which are gas-fired and easily flexed—there is no problem. But as far as coal-based power plants are concerned, there is some restriction on ramping down the rate of reducing or increasing the load. At the same time, there is a limitation below which they cannot come, which is called technical minimum. So to integrate more and more renewable energy, storage solutions are essential. As of now, there is limited storage capacity, but the Government of India—both the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy but mainly the Power Ministry—is seized of this matter and they have been working on this. We have been deliberating different solutions: pumped storage capacity is one, another is batteries going forward, there can be thermal storage systems, as well as some new technologies like the carbon dioxide storage system which can also work on that.

No, I think there is a lot of work going on. The pumped storage projects—even as late as this week, there have been discussions on that. The states are being asked to facilitate those sites as well as required permissions so that the pumped storage projects can come as fast as possible. Pumped storage is a long-term storage solution, but for the short-term solution, battery prices are also coming down. Battery prices have corrected very sharply in the last one year. But batteries cannot be taken as a round-the-clock solution as of today. Maybe tomorrow there is some other development—if that happens, it will be looked into. But as of now, what we should be looking at from batteries is only about 2 hours to 4 hours maximum for storage solutions. So the focus is on the pumped storage side.

See, pumped storage—more or less, this is like a hydro project. It is a hydro project which can work in both cycles. There is pumping during the time when there is enough capacity available in the grid, and when you require the power to be fed to the grid at that point, it works exactly like a hydro plant. So we have quite good capacity in the country itself. There is a lot of work going on in the battery side also. I'm sure that with the government's thrust on Make in India and Atmanirbhar Bharat, we should be having these capacities coming on board quite soon—like what had happened initially on the modules for the solar plants. Initially there was a constraint, but today we have almost 50,000 megawatt per year capacity. Similarly, we should be in a position to develop this.