Little back-up to keep power plants running in the battle against Covid-19

At Jhanjhra coal mines in West Bengal, some 155 workers and their bosses are in some sort of quarantine, with all their supply lines having been taken care of so that there is no disruption as they extract the fossil fuel. The mine is one of the largest of Coal India’s subsidiary, Eastern Coalfields, supplying coal to electricity generating companies.
Coal production has been exempted from the countrywide lockdown and with good reason. There are no medicines to cure a Covid-19 patient but there are machines that can help and all of them run on electricity.
“The mine is being kept completely secluded from the outside world. Their (boarding and lodging) is out of bounds for any outsider including their family members,” said Sunil Chaturvedi, CMD, Gainwell Commosales, which is running the mine that has estimated reserves of 62.22 million tonnes.
Along with medicines, assured supply of electricity is thus an essential ingredient in the fight against Covid-19. For India, this is generally a comfortable piece of information, as it has a generation capacity of 369 Gw of electricity and a peak demand of less than 200 Gw. The national grid monitored by the five regional load despatch centres is also robust.
Yet like other sectors, electricity is also getting upended in this period. The demand for electricity from non-domestic uses will certainly fall. Overall demand for power grew by 1.67 per cent in 2019-20 till the end of February. It was 5.3 per cent a year before. Those numbers would have worsened in March and will certainly do so in April.
This is despite the fact that India has completed a massive exercise to reach electricity connection to all homes (under the Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana, or DDUGJY, to reach all villages and Saubhagya to reach all homes), last year. It has ensured a steady supply of power to homes but the quality of supply to industrial and essential services sector has dipped. As a result, the percentage growth for renewable power is outstripping that from fossil fuel-based sources. The respective percentages were 8.2 and 1.1. Both are lower than the CAGR of the past few years.
This is likely to make the challenge of keeping the grid running more difficult, as Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency notes in a commentary: “Electricity system operators have to constantly balance demand and supply in real time. People typically think of power outages as happening when demand overwhelms supply. But in fact, some of the most high-profile blackouts in recent times took place during periods of low demand.”
The plant load factor of India's thermal power units between April 2019 and February 2020, at 56.4 per cent, “has been the lowest in nearly two and half decades”, notes a report by Care Ratings on the sector. This will be even more pronounced going forward. So going by Birol’s warning, the big impact of these changes is likely to fall on grid discipline. Renewable power needs a sustained back-up to make up for the times of the day when the Sun does not shine or the wind falls off. As the utilisation rate of coal-based power plants has declined by over 15 per cent in the last nine years and that of gas-based plants by 44 per cent, there is effectively no back-up available. Last October, the capacity utilisation of coal based power plants had dipped to less than 50 per cent for the first time ever. Experts suggest that it should never fall below 55 per cent.

When the capacity of the plants become so low, more and more operators find it uneconomic to keep the plants running. It costs more to keep a coal-based power plant operating at such a low level of demand than to shut it down. So ,in the middle of the night, as Covid-19 patients swamp medical facilities demanding heavy-duty reliable electricity supply, there could be a surge in demand for power but no source to meet it immediately. Renewable power plants would be running at low capacity at those times, making the challenge acute.