World Resources Institute | By: Tianyi Luo | July 26, 2017:
India is making great strides to aggressively expand its renewable energy capacity. But the country’s power sector remains highly reliant on thermoelectric plants, with high demand for water for cooling. That means that droughts, like the one caused last year by weak monsoons, can shut off the power, hampering the economy and potentially endangering lives.
To understand the impact and extent of these shutdowns in the thermal power sector, we compiled and analyzed over 1,400 Daily Outage Reports filed with India’s Central Electricity Authority between 2013 and 2016. We found that water shortage related shutdowns in 2016 cost India roughly 14 terawatt-hours (TWh) of thermal electricity generation, enough to power India’s neighbor Sri Lanka for an entire year.
Terawatt-hours Lost Due to Water Shortages:
Our analysis found that, in 2016, 18 thermal power plants in India had shutdowns caused by water shortages, ranging from days to months. Had these 18 plants had access to water during the shutdowns, they would have generated 14 TWh of electricity, about one percent of India’s annual consumption. During the 4 years from 2013 through 2016, India’s thermal power sector lost more than 30 TWh of potential electricity due to water shortages.
The real effect was compounded by the fact that most of these shutdown incidents happened from March through September. In these months—if the monsoon is weak or delayed, as it was in 2016— most of India is dry and hot, and the demand for electricity is high. Besides what’s needed for industry and domestic purposes, electricity is also needed to irrigate agriculture. In other words, electricity generation was the most hampered when people needed it the most.
The 18 plants were affected in different ways. Some lost a large share of capacity for a short period. Others lost a small share of capacity for a long period. (Shutdowns can last for hundreds of days).
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