A graphical summary of India power sector
1. Among major developing economies, despite its much higher economic growth rates, India has had the weakest growth in net capacity addition in recent years.
2. Interestingly growth in net power consumption has remained more or less steady since 2000, even during the high-growth periods of 2003-08. In contrast, economies like Vietnam and China have had much higher net power consumption rates in their high growth years.
3. This is even more surprising since India's very low percapita consumption ought to have a given a low base thrust. Note that, like with Indonesia, India's percapita consumption has barely inched forward over the past decade-and-half.
4. The relatively lower demand is also reflected in the remarkably stable growth in Plant Load Factor (PLF), even in the thermal sector, despite the significant increases in capacity addition in recent years. One would have thought that with the recent increases in capacity addition, the PLF should have risen.
5. The Achilles Heel though remains the very high transmission and distribution (T&D) losses, whose decline, worryingly enough, has plateaued off this decade. Come to think of this, the two phases of accelerated power restructuring programs appear to have had limited effect on loss reduction.
This blogger has consistently held the view that India's power surplus is deceptive. It conceals the suppressed demand arising from a combination of factors - fiscally enfeebled discoms preferring load reliefs to buying power whose cost of service is not recovered in the tariffs, deficient transmission infrastructure preventing evacuation of all available power, and displaced (to diesel generators etc) and suppressed economic activity due to poor quality of supply eroding business competitiveness.
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