Talking Shop: Darkness and sweat

“Happiness is watching

the television at your

girlfriend’s house when

a power failure occurs.”

— Bob Hope

In his quote above, Bob is hoping against hope. I am not into any hope of any kind anymore, because I am now married to that girl-friend. Since that’s got you smiling at my misery, let’s get to the grist.

The last few days have gone like clockwork, with power-cuts in Delhi helping me set the time on my watch, if need be. The daily power outage times are 0930 hours or 2230 hours, sometimes both. That’s Army precision – punctual, dependable and conscionable. There was but one mystery around the power-cut conundrum that eluded my wits, but wily I have finally cracked that whydunnit too. Sweating, I asked myself what happened a few days back that got this perspiration-gathering sopper running askew amongst us pigeons? It hit me. A few days back was the last day of polling. Power-cut Baba has been kind enough to wait for us to cast our votes and then mull over our decision in air-conditioned comfort. Suitably mulled, we are now ripe to be annulled, perhaps culled.

Lest this be taken as another tirade by another author at the same authorities, it is not. Electricity demand is ascending new highs each year, with this year’s summit in the National Capital thus far being 8,000 MW. If you find that crazy, which it is, look at the countrywide requirement – power demand scaled 250 GW on May 30, the highest this summer. The previous national high, ever, of 243.27 GW was seen in September 2023. Even in this stifling heat, these are chilling numbers.

Harsh on-ground reality

Well, it is something that we cannot really control, given our nation’s spiralling power needs. We need to remember how power is generated in this country. It is either coal-fired (thermal) or hydro-powered (water turbines). Coal is in short supply. Even with the Government pushing imports and Coal India Limited working 24x7 to produce more black gold, India had just enough coal in the bank last week to feed generation capacities for 19 days. As for water, last year’s late winter has shrunk captive holdings in most reservoirs to barely 20 per cent of capacity. That, ahem, is the reason that many of our power plants, facing unprecedented demand, have opted for the height of summer to plunge head-first into ‘maintenance work’.

This sudden zeal to carry out maintenance work is triggered by the shortage of coal supplies at India’s 269 (it was 135 plants just two years back) thermal power plants, with most having stockpiles for only a few days. In all, the 269 thermal plants have an installed capacity of around 394 GW. As for hydel power, the country has 197 hydro power plants spread across the nation with an installed generation capacity of around 149 GW.

In a happy-day scenario, thermal and hydel power together should be enough to take care of peak summer demand. However, this conjecture assumes that all power plants are working all the time, churning out power at full capacity, which is hardly the case. There are maintenance issues, regular downtime scenarios and, biggest of all, raw material shortages – it is this terrible troika that short-circuits all those afflicted by the Utopian syndrome.

Not India-centric

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and think of this as an India-centric problem; it is not. Across the world, there is a shortage of natural gas and coal supplies, impacting power-generation companies, fertilizer manufacturing operations and refineries adversely. And in what is indubitably the paradox of the century, the supply crunch stems from global economic recovery! Economic resurgence has triggered a calamitous run-up in the prices of energy, catalyzing a humongous switch to oil products and direct crude for power generation.

In the last few quarters alone, oil prices have firmed up, even as Vayu, our wind God, has decided to take a breather. Add to this relatively weak natural-gas inventories, and Europe, highly dependent on wind power generation, is reeling under an acute power crisis. An increasing trend to shore up power supply gaps is ‘Gas to Oil Switching’, a phenomenon when power plants running on oil are fired up, or ones that can be converted to run on crude are switching over. Goldman Sachs has repeatedly cited this while raising its oil-price forecasts, and energy consultants have warned that the power sector in Asia alone would use 500,000 more barrels of oil a day than before.

The global power order is changing and near-theatrical steps are needed to address the rut, or India will be left in the lurch. The situation is dire and power companies already have no option but to import an increasing part of coal requirements. That’s a no-brainer, but what’s intriguing is how they will go about pricing the generated power – because coal appears to be highly confused, exhibiting price increases and decreases on a weekly basis for the last few weeks as summer has kicked in.

We cannot go all-green

While green energy options simply have to be focused on, the focus on India’s conventional energy system should not be reduced – the way forward has to be strict monitoring of coal production, transport and sufficient stock-piling at power plants. This will ensure that any reduction in power generation from newer, green sources does not affect round-the-clock availability of power in the country. Worldwide, green energy initiatives have shown that they can boomerang, and that power systems can truly rely on renewable energy only when sufficient storage systems are available.

In the race to procure more stocks of coal, India is competing against buyers from Europe and China. China is the world’s largest coal consumer and is under tremendous internal pressure to ramp up imports amid a severe power crunch in that country. This and spiraling demand are firing up coal prices to record levels, making it all but financially unviable for India’s coal-based power plants to continue to sell power to discoms at contracted rates. Coal mining companies have to keep increasing output and Coal India has to keep a close watch on the stock situation of dry fuel, augmenting coal production and dispatches as and where critically needed.

India has a new Government and the global economic order is changing, making things rather tenuous. Within the country, we are facing debates and arguments, part of the blame-game that has already begun to play out as power outages get more frequent. We don’t need dance and jingoism anymore – the election campaigning gifted to us for two months have killed any such appetite. What is needed is careful planning and watchful implementation. That’s the only way to ensure that Power-cut Baba and his cronies don’t play the cat-and-pigeon game with us – come to think of it, the recent elections treated us to that redoubtable variety of Gurus as well.

The writer is a veteran journalist and communications specialist. He can be reached on [email protected]. Views expressed are personal