By Manish Gupta
Rising heatwave in India soared the country’s peak power demand to a new high of 2,21,076 MW on Wednesday as per the Grid Controller of India Ltd, raising concerns about power shortages as temperatures continue to rise.
Of course, power minister RK Singh maintains that the country is well prepared to meet the additional demand and that there will be no major outages.
The peak demand beats the previous record of 2,11,856 MW last summer on June 10, 2022. It is 4.4% higher than the peak power demand of last year. It also crossed the peak demand of 2,15,882 MW met on April 18 this year.
The increased demand for power raised the average market clearing price to Rs 7.51 per unit on the Indian Energy Exchange at peak time of 14:50 hours.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) said that maximum temperatures were in the range of 40-44 degree Celsius over many parts of the northwest, central, east and north peninsular India on Wednesday.
It further projected that heatwave conditions are likely to prevail over south Uttar Pradesh, west Rajasthan and north Madhya Pradesh during May 20-22.
“Due to humid air and high temperature, hot and discomfort weather is very likely over Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Konkan and Goa during next five days and over coastal Andhra Pradesh, Rayalaseema, Kerala and Tamil Nadu during May 18-20,” IMD said in a statement.
The government has estimated the peak power demand to reach 230 GW this summer.
The government has taken several steps to ensure that there is no repeat of the power outages as it happened in 2022 summer. It has asked all gencos to operate at full capacity, and ensured adequate availability of coal to them.
According to Central Electricity Authority’s daily coal data update, as on May 17, out of the 180 thermal plants across the country, 50 plants have coal stocks that are at critical levels.
Out of the 50 plants having critical coal stock, 31 are based on domestic coal, seven are designed on imported coal, seven are currently not in operation and five are plants based on washery rejects.
