Anil Rawal, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, IntelliSmart
Bhasmasura, a great devotee, pleased Lord Shiva through penance and Shiva granted him the boon that on whomsoever’s head he would place his hand would immediately turn to ashes. Bhasmasura used the boon indiscriminately and caused wide spread destruction. Mischievously, he one day decided to place his hand on Lord Shiva, who ran to Vishnu for help. Vishnu managed to place Bhasmasura’s hand on his own head by trapping him in dance moves, thus causing his destruction. These stories carry subtle but vital messages for generations. The journey of the human race is closely analogous to Bhasmasura’s and we are trying to destroy the very source of our creation, mother nature. There is a possibility of us being trapped in an imminent and irreversible catastrophic situation of global climate change within this century, causing wide-scale destruction of liveable resources. The Paris Agreement committed to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 °Celsius within this century; if serious and concerted actions are not taken, this could cross 3 °Celsius. It is critical because every fraction of a degree of warming will result in many more lives lost and livelihoods damaged.
COP26 and achieving net zero emissions through energy transition
A follow-up meeting of heads of states in Glasgow is a milestone event towards humanity’s efforts to avert the ominous changes. The participating countries agreed to reach net zero emissions by different calendar milestones. India also agreed to meet the target by 2070. For a country to achieve net zero emissions, it needs to evaluate the components that are adding these gases and balance these out with the components that would suck these gases out of the air.
Achieving net zero in India would require a fast-paced transition to renewables, a significantly reduced dependence on fossil fuels and a move to electric vehicles (EVs) much more swiftly. The estimates show that the country would need to transition to an energy mix where 50 per cent of the energy needs are met from non-fossil fuel sources. This means that against the estimated capacity of 1,130 GW by 2030, the country will need to have a solar energy installed capacity of 280 GW and a wind energy installed capacity of 140 GW. The rest of the energy needs will come from nuclear.
Such a high reliance on non-fossil sources, increased penetration of green energy in the grid and mass adoption of EVs would present a significant threat to disbalance the grid, introducing significant variability in energy flows, which could be bidirectional now with consumers turning “prosumers” as they produce and pump power into the grid from their solar rooftop sources. This energy transition throws up challenges of meeting social, climate and economic objectives while maintaining the reliability, scalability, security and stability of the grid.
Building grid flexibility is a key challenge
Meeting these targets would need building high flexibility in the grid while maintaining low costs of the energy units delivered to consumers. Flexibility in the grid could be obtained at various levels and each level would have a different cost and impact on the grid. First could be generation-side flexibility, which is linked with the capability of a power system to modify electricity production or consumption in response to variability of renewables, ensuring system security. This could be achieved through varying the generation through other sources, namely, gas-based plants, hydro plants or introducing varying generation in thermal plants. While there are limitations of gas availability and limited hydro contribution, there are also technical limits to varying thermal plant generation. This flexibility, therefore, has possibilities of limited contribution to the grid in our case. The other possibility could be through storage sources, say, battery storage or pumped hydro. This is a very effective solution but has limited play on account of the cost of the batteries and the gestation period of pumped hydro.
Granular demand-side management through consumer-centric ToU
The country has already done some work in this area by the separation of agricultural feeders, which helps operators shift agricultural demand from high- to low-demand zones. Further, a limited application of time of use (ToU) has been done in the country in industrial segments in some states; however, mass-scale roll-out of ToU is still to be seen. The ToU could engage consumers and prosumers effectively and constructively through digitalisation and smart grid applications. The engagement of consumers could be based on dynamic price signalling or adjusting loads by operators, calling for the variable energy sources at load peak hours of the grid. This could make consumers the largest asset for managing flexibility in the grid.
The roll-out of mass-scale advanced metring infrastructure (AMI) in the country is offering the opportunity to manage the demand side in a far more granular manner and effectively in the key consumption zones of residential, commercial and industrial consumers. Internationally, widespread digitalisation and the use of residential smart meters have been the source of flexibility for boosting mass-scale decarbonisation. In India, along with mass-scale AMI, the data emerging from smart metering needs be tightly mapped to the demand-side management tools of SCADA, DT-level metering and energy audit as well big data analytics to derive actionable insights for demand-side management and grid flexibility.
The Paris Agreement and COP26 are critical events towards saving humanity from the imminent catastrophic events visible within this century. Such large climate changes within a span of 100 years are extremely fast and the period would appear like a blink of the eye in the life history of the planet. This generation has a duty to pass on the planet to the next generation in a more healthy shape than what we inherited. That would require extremely swift actions and concerted efforts on the social, political, economic, ecological and technological levels by engaging the widest possible stakeholders in managing and averting these ominous events.