“Over time, the system will need to move away from generation-led transmission planning towards a model where generation and transmission are co-optimally planned and executed,” Das highlighted.
At a time when India is exploring austerity measures, the lost clean electricity may have reduced reliance on costly natural gas imports or freed up domestic gas supplies for higher-priority uses outside the power sector at a time when spot gas prices were nearly twice the levels prevailing before the US-Israel war against Iran in West Asia.
In the short-term, the report recommends using batteries for “transmission-as-a-service”. Ember’s report last year already highlighted that batteries are a “multitool” for the power sector, and this report showcases that with the right regulatory changes, the commercial case is there for batteries to plug India’s transmission gaps in the short-term.
“Battery storage at pooling stations is the fastest available fix to resolve transmission constraints. Roughly 3–4 GW of two-hour storage could have absorbed most of the curtailed generation, against 236 GW of plug-and-play BESS headroom already available at major pooling stations. The technical pieces are in place; the gap is regulatory and commercial,” says Das.
The report recommends two regulatory measures to unlock such a solution. First, an intermediary government-backed entity could aggregate power from renewable energy projects that only have a temporary general network access (T-GNA) and contract it to BESS developers. This would remove the contracting risk that comes from plants entering and exiting the T-GNA queue.
Second, BESS can be procured as a transmission asset just like any other grid element, with capacity payments socialised across states in the same way as transmission charges. With the levelised cost of storage at INR 4.0–4.5/kWh and solar at around INR 2.5/kWh, the combined delivered cost lands at INR 7–8/kWh, well below the INR 10/kWh that many states currently pay for peak power.
