Pan-India real-time market of electricity launched 

Pan-India real-time market of electricity launched 

Part of: GS-Prelims and GS-III – Infrastructure (Energy)

In News:

• Recently, the government has launched a pan-India real-time market of electricity to enable the buyers and sellers to meet their energy requirement closer to real time of operation.

Key takeaways 

• It is an organized market platform which will bring required flexibility to provide real time balance while ensuring optimal utilization of the available surplus capacity in the system.
• Shorter bidding time, faster scheduling, and defined processes will enable the participants to access resources throughout the all India grid, promoting competition.
• The market would open for 30 minutes in a day. 
• Buyers and sellers would have the option of placing buy or sell bids for each 15-minute time block.
• It will also help manage diversity in the demand pattern in the country with a market at national level.
• It would help to mitigate challenges of grid management and help to integrate higher amounts of renewable energy (RE) resources into the grid.
• It would provide an alternate mechanism for Discoms to access larger markets at competitive prices.
• It would lead to cost optimization of power purchase and serving the consumers with reliable supply as any last minute requirement of power can easily be bought from the Real Time market.
• Earlier regime of managing the grid by load shedding due to last minute changes will be avoided.
• In a nutshell:
  • Generators shall have opportunity to sell their surpluses
  • Better management of variability of RE generation 
  • Better utilization of transmission systems
  • Opportunity for discoms to buy or sell power 
  • Consumers shall get reliable power supply