Transformation of India’s Power Grid. Part 1: The Building Blocks | ft. S K Soonee

[Podcast intro]

Welcome to the season five of the India Energy Hour podcast. This podcast explores the most pressing hurdles and promising opportunities of India energy transition through an in depth discussion on policies, financial markets, social movements and science. Your hosts for this episode are Shreya Jai, Delhi based energy and climate journalist and Dr. Sandeep Pai, Washington based energy transition researcher and author. The show is produced by 101 reporters, a pan India network of grassroots reporters that produces original stories from rural India. If you like our podcast, please rate us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or the platform where you listen to our podcast. Your support will help us reach a larger audience.

The evolution of India’s electricity grid reflects the ever-changing dynamics of the country’s economic and infrastructure growth. Built as a backbone to coal-based power, the grid is now upgrading itself to handle green electricity, give space to energy storage and be flexible to fluctuating demand-supply scenarios.

The India Energy Hour brings a special series on the progress of the grid in India, how far it has come in last the 78 years and what the future looks like as we aim to be a net carbon zero economy in the next two decades. From policy to technology, the series scans all aspects of the country’s electricity grid.

In the first part, we spoke with a man synonymous with the grid’s evolution – S K Soonee – first CEO of the Power System Operation Corporation (now Grid India), country’s central power grid operator. Soonee was at the helm of creation of Grid India, key development milestones and policy-altering incidents.

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[Podcast interview]

Shreya Jai: Hello, and welcome to the India Energy Hour, Mr. Soonee. We are delighted and grateful, that you could join us here. And thanks again. We hope that this would be a very interesting episode on a topic that we have not covered much on this podcast. So thank you again for joining us here.

 S K Soonee: Thank you.

Shreya Jai: Mr. Soonee, you are synonymous with the growth of India’s power grid and its modernization in recent year. Can you take us through that journey? Tell us about your career. Where did you study? Where are you from? And how was the journey working around India’s grid modernization?

S K Sooner: Thank you, Shrey, mam. No.I feel very humble when you say I’m synonymous with the grid. Grid is too large, too big, and I’m a very humble grid operator. So very quickly, I’m born in Calcutta, brought up family hails from Rajasthan, but, deeply rooted in value of services. And I studied, electrical engineering at IIT Kharagpur, mid seventies, and, then joined central power engineering services. That’s by choice. That’s how I was motivated by my parents. So keen on mission building. At that time, that used to be the mantra. So I was quite fascinated by, you know, a public infrastructure, systems thinking, and, our professors in IIT gave solid value system besides electrical engineering. So, after engineering services, I joined the CA, but I never worked in CA. I was posted in Eastern Region. And at that time, load dispatch center was just at its infancy. There’s nothing. One telephone and one frequency meter. So we started from that, very, very humble tabletop control center, if you may call, And then gradually brought in SCADA, EMS, moving into grid operation. And, I had the fortune of, working in all the RLDCs. You know, it helped in shaping power system operation corporation, which is now Grid India. So that experience has been terrific and led the dispatch systems, then market, tariff, grid code, first grid code drafting, and was also deeply involved in electricity act, formation of regulatory commissions. So I have, very rightly said I have seen the grid evolve from fragmented islands to a unified grid in India. So I’m very deeply grateful to the almighty, to my parents, to my teachers and colleagues that I could serve and I continue to serve to the best of my capability. That’s in just what I can say about myself. Thank you.

Shreya Jai: Thank you for that. Any particular role, in which, you know, you were very excited. You mentioned you’re part of when India’s first grid code was written. Any other such role or project which is memorable for you and which, you know, obviously became a milestone in India’s power sector’s journey?

S K Sooner: Yeah. So I’ll give you an anecdote. Somewhere in ’79 or ’80, there was a conference in Goa. That time, conference used to be very rare, and we used to, you know, get rare opportunity. And I went there. Lot of discussions at a high level was going on. I was young at that time, so I made a transparency. At that time, some nearly around 40 grids were there in India. So I made a, three slide presentation, requested that kindly allow me. They gave me permission and I said that one day the whole country should be connected. I was, you know, literally very mocked at and sort of ridiculed that do you have any idea how much investment is required? How will you operate the grade? Anyway, young man, keep this aspiration. So I came back and I really thought that if all other parts of the world are doing this, why India cannot do? That was ’78 and 2013, all India grid became a reality. But it took time. It takes time to do such, you know, major reforms. And any such reforms are, you know, time consuming. They need tenacity. They need champions. That happens in any major reform in society. So to me, this dream that one day the country will be one great, I could see, that’s a great contentment and the other one, which is a work in progress is that we should have an all India market, all India, one price Then that price should be involving every generator, every player, the real marginal price of the grid. And that’s what I am now at this stage working on for last decade or so. Thank you.

Shreya Jai: Great. Thank you so much for that. Before we get into the minor details of the issue that we are to discuss in this episode, can you give the our audience a broad overview of India’s national power grid, which are the key controlling agencies such as Power Grid, Grid India, the central transmission utility? And what are their tasks? What kind of role do they play?

S K Sooner: Yeah. So a very important point, besides all kinds of engineering and economics, governance, and regulation, there is something which I learned is institutional engineering. I know you don’t have to fix pipes. Fix the institution will fix the pipe. So, what India has done is reorganize its institutions. And that’s what the act 2003 really did it very well, though we started almost a decade ago, is that we have unbundle the SCBs, the monolithic ones, same in, at the union level, central level, all sorts of specialization. NTPC, thermal power plant, NHPC, Lignite Corporation, Power Corporation, Nuclear Power Corporation, name it, and there is a separate institution for super speciality. Central Electricity Authority, adviser to Ministry of Power, which is a, you know, knowledge partner with the ministry. Then when it came to transmission, first is the separated transmission from generation, but in transmission also, the one who will construct and one who will plan were separated. And one who will operate also is separated. So, it is like this, independent system planner, independent system operator. All these functions by statute have been ring fenced. And, that’s, I would say, the great institutional engineering, as per our, you know, visionary legislators and electricity act did that. And that’s how we have CTU. That’s how we have NLDC, RLDC, SLDC, STU, CRC, SCRCs. These are all institutions. And then we have privatized generations, so we have IPPs, private sector in generation. In transmission also, we have private sector, but they are only for bill building the transmission, not for operation. For operation, it is a statutory body. So I would say that, yes, this institutional engineering, who controls, who constructs, who plans, and then who regulates, All these have been very carefully designed and over the year, this has evolved. And, you know, on on market side also, we could have had market with the system operator, but then we debated and said that, no. Let that also be a separate one. It’s like, you know, you grow and branch out, branch out and grow. Of course, the timing matters, but so far it has worked very well. And, the whole world is watching that how we are able to build such a massive grid, with federal structure, all kinds of complication. I would give most of the credit to these institutional engineering.

Shreya Jai: Yes. Thank you for explaining that. You know, you mentioned about, you know, how it has changed, what kind of control, various institutions have. Can you also tell us how the India’s power grid has evolved over the last two decades? You know, there there were obviously, initial thought was of expansion, by India’s founding fathers. The idea was to make power reach in every corner of the country. Then it was to offer better technology, energy security led to energy access. Then now it is all about energy transition. So, so can you sum up on what the journey over all these last two, three decades has been?

S K Sooner: Yeah. So one of the first report which I read, as a young engineer and that has left an imprint on my mind is the committee report. And, I still have a copy of it and keep reading. It made certain very, you know, landmark recommendations. And that was and lot of options were debated during the period. Should everything be centralized? Should, federal structure so transmission, does the state have the jurisdiction or not? Where we stop, unions intervention? How do we harmonize it? Should we have centralized dispatch? Do should we have decentralized one? All these things are very nicely debated and very well articulated. One thing was very clear that we are a union of states and states have their own legislators. They have their own regulatory commissions. They have their, aspirations of the people, the government. So one has to respect states’ jurisdiction. And then on top of that, we have a union or a central, whatever we may call it. And, that gives light to lot of coordination issue, but that also gives a check and balance, which is working very fine. And, that’s how we got interstate transmission, interstate generating station, interstate regulation by CRC, whereas everything mirror clause are there in the state. So, evolving this has been a tough and this is there in many other, parts of the world also. For example, in The US also, you have federal regulator and, provincial regulators. And, with this in background, we started developing. And as I mentioned earlier also, initially, even the state was not synchronized. I started in Eastern region. We used to have 10 or 12 frequencies. Even one state was not fully integrated. That was the toughest period, you know, how to build transmission, funds were an issue, technology was an issue. But, I mean, our visionary leaders continued to build and then we kept on integrating one by one, one by one and state by state forming regions that took us almost more than a decade and a half. And then there was a unanimous thing that we would have, what is called national grid. And before that, let me also, you know, pause and say 1964, all the ministers said that we will demarcate the country into five regions. And mind you, it’s not divide the region country into five regions. I’m very particular about it. It is demarcating the country into five regions, Northeast, West, South, and Northeast. That was also very, you know, thoughtful because it was geopolitical boundaries were taken care of, the resource diversity was taken care of. And initial stage, the regions developed, and then we started integrating the regions. And that was a long period, almost two decades it took, to integrate the states into the region. And then region by region also took a lot of time, almost, I would say, roughly around ten to fifteen years. And, there again, the question was whether we should have synchronous connection, should we have asynchronous connection, should we have one heartbeat, one frequency, or continue with two frequencies? See the, if you look at the world, I think India is the only country which has completely synchronized and the largest one. Take US. You have at least three grids, if not more. Eastern Interconnect, Western Interconnect, and Texas. Similarly, China also has got a southern grade and state grid of China. But in India, we started with HVDCs between the regions and then gradually, we had a hybrid connection and we said that, no. Let’s have the synchronous connection. And that worked. And, of course, initially, we had the setbacks and, those are long story. Every line connection has its own history and, very interesting developments. But there was no looking back because then we could utilize the diversity of the country, resource diversity, demand diversity, and then one state could come to the rescue of other very quickly. So that’s how the grid was gradually developed. And today it’s working fine, but, of course, I must also say that there is a big risk in this. There are lots and lots of advantage, but there is a big risk that you have one big grid. So one has to be very careful about it. That’s all I would say here. Thank you.

Shreya Jai: Got it. I would like to go more into this one nation, one grid, and now one price plan. But before that, you know, very quickly, you know, synchronization has been a a watershed moment for India’s grid. But before that happened, there were a couple of events, the major being the twenty twelve blackout, which was a shocking event, and I’m sure there were a lot of lessons learned for the power system in India. For the uninitiated in ’20, ’12, July, July, there was a nationwide blackout. It’s a started with the Northern state of Uttar Pradesh and then soon spread across the North, East and West of the country. The South was isolated because it was not synchronized yet. But that was, that was the moment when, you know, people sat up and, you know, decided to overhaul things. Can you take us through to this event, what was done to, you know, contain its, contain the disaster and what was done later, and what were the lessons that were learned from that?

S K Sooner: Oh, sure, ma’am. I am so sensitive to this. I have lived through that disturbance as a CEO of the, Posoco. So, you know, what happens is if certain things work fine, the complacency sets in all around. People think that nothing will happen to the great. Planners started thinking that we have made, you know, unsinkable Titanic. That’s why I always say that that whatever you do, you have to be very careful with the grade. And, we were at a very high growth period. And, towards the end of the month, fast rate of commissioning, standards were not much, developed. And people thought that, yes, things can work. And then, you know, some all the loopholes of the cheese align, and then you had a disturbance. But that but we did restore it very quickly. But I tell you, prior to that, you know, we used to have every week one disturbance in the country, and we were very expert in restoring the grid and things like that. But 2012 was a large one, a huge amount of load loss and public and all that. But, it was also a lesson to the policy maker, to the regulators, to the planners that you cannot take grid for granted. You got to prepare proper defense plans, put the right kind of grid codes, let the people be disciplined, and, even politicians also realize that, yes, if you don’t do this, then this would happen. And earlier, I sometimes people used to think that I am intimidating, that something will happen to the grid. Nothing will happen to the grid. So I used to run that Titanic movie to the operators that, you know, look, the unsinkable Titanic also sank, because, somebody did not look at it. So I would say that such a disturbance was was a eye opener to the those who are not, used to grit. And we took full advantage of it, set right many things. And even today, I keep telling the youngsters that, you should simulate all kinds of possible, assault which can come on the grid. And, while it’s quite, stable and secure grid, but saying that it’ll not sink is like saying that Titanic will never sink. So, whichever grid it may be of the world, I have a firm belief that under certain conditions, it can be. But even if it gets disturbed, it should be, you know, resilient. It should fail proof, disintegrate properly so that we can quickly restore. So those are all things, you know, then in and and I mean, there’s a lot to talk about it, but, so we have n minus one, credible contingency. What is credible? Believable. That means one line can trip, two line can trip. But if you think that there will be a earthquake, then there will be a tsunami, and there will be many other disasters, and still the grid should stand. No. You have not created such a grid. So contingency, when occurs, we have to act accordingly. I think grid has matured a lot, but, and and now with the inverter base, things are becoming even more complicated. So more situational awareness, more coordination, more defense plans, All these things have to be stepped up. That’s where I would stop. Thank you.

Shreya Jai: Right. Got it. Thank you for answering it in a as comprehensive manner as possible. And I can completely understand what you must have gone through because you were at, you know, the first line of defense when, all of this happened. What do you think, the role of national synchronization has been in stabilizing the Indian grid? You did talk about it a bit, but if you can go a little deeper and take us to the journey of planning and executing this this one nation, one grid plan. And how is this one price also getting integrating into it, and how soon will it be a reality?

S K Sooner: Yeah. So, see, it’s like this. When we are building anything, all the investments are lumpy in nature. You build transmission, which is lumpy. You bring a generator, which is lumpy. So every state, even if it has done its homework right, it will have sometimes surplus, sometimes deficit. And our country is a country of diversity. Even time diversity of nearly an hour between the Northeast and extreme West, and, seasonal diversity, by the time the summer is over in southern part of the country, North is still having cold, and soym is with rains, same is with festivals. So I always say that if we had Durga Puja and Ganesh Puja on the same day, greed will be in trouble. So we have variety of diversity. And with the common greed, we harness that. And, the other part is, that if something happens in one part of the country, because of the interconnection, everybody else comes to the rescue. I mean, empty number of experience, cyclone like hoodooed, Thailand, and we get some information and we tell that state that you please save your system. The whole country rises to the occasion and, we would for during that period of cyclone, everybody will stand by and through that grid, everybody extends support and, the we ride through this. So there has been enormous benefit. The other part is the, economy of scale. Because we got such a, big grid, we could go for seven sixty five KB lines. We could go for thousand megawatt sets like, Kodam Kulam. We could go for ultra mega power plants of four gigawatts. The small systems can’t think of all that. So as far as the large grid is concerned, the, advantages are tremendous, and we all so so solidarity through this grid. And coming to prices and market, which you talked about, so our principle is that first is keep the grid safe. The second is let the cheaper power replace the costlier power till the congestion is discovered. That is the mantra. So for that, you know, power flows left, right, because wherever the cheaper power is, it will start replacing costly power because the grid connection is there. So that way, the national grid has really, really did a great, great job. But I would say that, yes, we have become one frequency, and we have become an interconnected grid since 2013 and or 2014 onwards. But to say that we have become a completely integrated, optimized grid, that’s still a long way to go, which means that, that that one price not only of a power exchange, which is 6%, that we that if a generator is generating, no generator costlier than that should be in the grid because that’s how we will cause economy. That will be taking a lot of time, a lot of nuances in that. And then once this such a large grid is there, a disadvantage also. I mean, there are always, you know, pros and cons and cost and benefits that we need everybody to be disciplined. If you are connected to the grid, you can’t be a rogue, member of the grid. And that requires a kind of a discipline. 2012 did help us, but still I would say, be it regulator or the policy makers, are somewhat, you know, complacent in this, unlike other parts of the world where the indiscipline is absolutely not tolerated. But that’s there for almost many other things, be it, traffic or any other things. So once you are doing, running such a large grid, everybody has to abide and strictly abide by it. And if you don’t, then the regulator should come with a very heavy hand. I’ve been able to get some penalties for some states and, that’s a big trauma to get anything done. But, one has to respect that if you have to run such a large grid, you must be disciplined. Thank you.

Shreya Jai:  Right. Can we talk a bit about the technology part as well? How was the technology for operating, managing, and monitoring the grid developed, and how much of it was in house development?

S K Sooner: Yeah. So in the initial period, everything was mostly imported, I would say, that, But then gradually, our, you know, homemade things started happening. And, SCADA, EMS, even in transmission, even in generation, BHL came up. And, we started having our in house things, quite a lot. Still, imported component is huge. But one good thing which we did, and I will say that I was very, very particular and, I still love when everybody says that make in India. It’s not only a slogan. It has to be imbibed. For example, when we are designing our markets, when we are designing how we will operate our power system, we will study every grid in the world. We will listen to everyone, but do what is good for us and do it with our own hand. And in house development of the grid code, no consultant was there for the grid code. No consultant was there for a market design. These are landmark things. And that’s how we are so agile because we have also done it. We can quickly change it. For example, look at, phaser measurement units to new technology. We were one of the first ones in the world to try it with a couple of PMUs because we were to integrate, southern grid, so we put phaser measurement unit. That was completely in house. And, even all kinds of dashboards, visualization, even our this security constraint economic dispatch. Entire thing is in house. We have developed it from scratch, and that’s what we are trying to say that we can do it. We have the capability in India. There is no dearth of technical knowledge, and, we should continue to do that. Of course, take, you know, now there’s literature. There is no problem at all. Net is full of literature. Go and have exposure also, but do it. Intrinsic capability must be developed. That’s all I would say that that should be emphasized. Self reliance, is absolutely important.

Shreya Jai: Right. So, now that we have talked about how the whole grid has developed, what do you think are some of the new set of challenges, that India’s power grid faces? And by challenges, I would, you know, start with the focus on, you know, how the demand trajectory of this country is going. We did have some low demand periods during the, three years of COVID, but post that, it has just been going up every year. High demand periods are, becoming more frequent, are extending every year because, you know, the hot months are increasing.Then there is more renewable energy in the grid, and then there is lack of balancing sources. Out of this, let’s just first start with, how high demand periods and how, changing of demand hours earlier it used to be late evening, early morning. Now it has shifted to afternoon hours as well. How is the grid handling this frequent changes in demand patterns?

S K Sooner: Yeah. So very rightly, you have picked up the demand. Actually, we say load is load. Actually, load curve represents society. The way people behave, the load curve behaves like that. If people rise early in Northeast, their load increases early. If in the West, people rise late, the load curve is to be shifted. So it’s a manifestation of society. How much is the industrial load? How much is the agriculture load? How much is the commercial load? And the way they grow, and the way they grow in time and space and granularity. The load curve of every state is different and has been changing. We have a couple of very extensive, reports on load curve, which analyzes why the load has changed like this, what were the reasons for it, what were the interventions made, And the challenge is how will it look like in future? For example, we had shifted all the agriculture load to the night at at, say, twenty years ago because we had shortages. But today, we are shifting the entire agriculture load to the moon because we have a high solar. So the load is something it takes a lot of time to understand load if you want to understand. And that is why I always say that we need distribution system operator. So a load, how will it look like in future? Yes. The type of load which are coming nowadays are different than what it used to be. There is energy efficiency, no doubt about it. But then, the way the data center load is coming up, the way the electrolyzer for hydrogen will come up, the way the EV loads will come up, the way the thermal comfort air conditioning load is coming up. We really we really have to be very, very agile and, keep correcting ourselves how the load, will take. Now load is one part. What as operator, I have been worried about is the ramping of the load. So we have 20 to 30% of the time when the ramping of one state cancels with the other. And that is where the opportunity lies. Somewhere the state, the load is rising, somewhere the load is falling. How do we take advantage of these two? So the load curve analysis, the IT, the AI, the machine learning, this is the right place to do it. We have granular data, huge amount of data, and, we should torture this data. It will tell us the truth, and it will tell us how the things will look like in future. And then the policy makers should take lessons out of it. So, you are absolutely right that this is what the data is. But one thing is very clear, we can change our load curve. In the past, we have changed our load curves. We are good at changing our load curves. We are frugal people. We are, very flexible people. If you give me cheaper power, I don’t mind, shifting my dinner by an hour. So we need demand response in this country. We will make the demand as a part of the equation. Everything from supply side is no good. So load is fundamental and that is why in the resource adequacy exercise, which is going on, gone are those days where we used to only talk of peak load and then some load factor energy. No. Now it’s eight seven six zero hours simulation with renewables, with market, with, load, kind of loads changing. So so, yes, it’s a it’s quite a challenging one. But then again, the all India grid helps in this. That if you have margins and even if you what you projected and you are slightly delayed or you are advanced, you can manage the grid because of the interconnection. So we should have enough strong interconnection margin to take care of all these errors, diversity in errors of the states while they forecast their demand.

Shreya Jai:  Let’s talk about demand a bit. Over all these years, supply, has driven the planning for the grid as I understood. But going forward, demand patterns will play a huge role, you just mentioned. So how is demand pattern analysis being made part of, planning for grid management? And, you know, how much would time of the day tariff, changing demand patterns will play a role, especially time of the day tariff, which is being seriously considered.

S K Sooner: Yeah. So all these things taken together, a lot of things to do. Number one, only saying peak period is not enough. You have to project the entire load curve. At least hourly load curves, that means eight seven six zero hour points have to be projected. Then whether you are working in solar hours, whether you are working in non solar hours, seasonality, all these things have to be very, very meticulously factored as far as the load curve is concerned. Then the question comes that demand has to be made part of the system. Hitherto thinking that demand, nothing can be done, only work on supply side, today, it is very expensive to work with that presumption. Demand can also be flexible. We can have megawatt, you can have megawatts. So demand response has to be developed much, much faster, a large industry, hotels, air conditionings, many, many areas. So that’s a very important point on demand response and demand flexibility. That is important, and that includes time of the day. That includes, bidding for demand response and, then, you know, by design changing the lifestyle of people so that, we, change the for example, if you change the clock time, people will get up a little early. We will use the sunlight much better, and, people by design should use the sunlight more better than going for the late evening. So it will require there is a project called life project, and I’m sure these things will help us in, you know, modulating our load curve the way we want to transition into net zero. For transitioning net to net zero, in my humble view, the lifestyle change has to be the first priority and that will reflect into the load curve.

Shreya Jai: As a consumer, I want to ask, can the demand side be managed? You just said that, you know, people can delay their ten hours. People, the the idea of time of the data if is that you could know people can plan when they run their washing machines or at what time should AC should be running at peak. You plan your domestic activities or maybe commercial activities to a certain extent on the basis of, the rate at which you get electricity. But is it easy to be, can it be easily done in a market like India?

S K Sooner: Yeah. So India has done it. Andhra Pradesh literally inverted their load curve during shortage period. They shifted their agriculture, industrial people. India, first thing is that, again, I would say that we are frugal people. We are responsive to the price. Indians are very responsive to the price. And you very rightly said, for example, look at, the amount of hotels which are there. Their air conditioning, if they stop during peak hours, nothing will happen. Consumer will not even know about it. They have chillers, and they can store that and run the air conditioner. This is one example. All the washing machines can run on the under noon hours. There is absolutely no difficulty whatsoever. So and pumps. All pumps should run during noon hours. That that there should be a very loud and clear from rooftop that don’t run water lifting pump during other than noon hours. But we still have societies which because of the legacy, because of the history, they will run their pump in the morning. Why? Run it during the noon hours when we have enough solar. So all municipalities, all societies should run their pump during noon hours. There is a lot of, I would say, PR activity, lot of advocacy, and, you know, we have to make consumer aware that we have surplus. We have price zero. We have surplus solar. Please align with it. And I have, written a number of times that, you know, we are all aligned to the solar system. It’s not that we start looking at the solar clock or our own clock. We should work with that. And, I think our government is already working in that direction. But if right incentive is given, we would change. And that is not that you give peanuts incentive. You give that the price will be five times. You will get very cheap. Say, everybody will move into that diagonally, let’s say, EV charging. What is the problem? Then people will think over it. So I am quite hopeful about it, and there is no other choice also. We cannot keep on putting on capacity and, make so much investment, which will be underutilized. So demand response and, demand flexibility is the mantra for this country.

Shreya Jai: I’ll hold on to that hopeful thought of yours and then talk about something that seems to be troubling the grid a lot, and that is an influx of lot of renewable energy. We are hearing things like duck curve. We are talking about that renewable has to be backed down at times so that it does not load the grid too much so that there is uninterrupted power supply. Basically, there are all sorts of issues that are coming in as more and more renewables keeps getting added to the grid, which is a good news in a way, but it might not be because we don’t have balancing sources. We don’t have storage, and coal is our mainstay. So in middle of this, how hopeful are you about, RE synchronizing with the grid, and what more needs to be done to balance out the whole situation?

S K Sooner: Yes. So we all know that, coal plants are tamable plants. They listen to the operator, whereas solar and wind don’t listen to the operator. They come and go. Their intermittency and variability, is something which we have to live with. But at the same time, now the forecasting tools are improving day by day. Technology is improving. We I I don’t think nowadays one will see suddenly, there is a rain. No. It doesn’t. You start getting indications quite some time. Meteorological department has tremendously improved over the years. So now we know the pattern, we know the behavior. We have to match our other things accordingly. Maybe flexibility has to improve. We cannot have, you know, base load kind of a plants which are inflexible. So the plants have to become flexible. Even demand also has to be become flexible. And, forecasting has to be, much much better. Proper price signals have to be there. And if after that, sometimes under the extreme conditions, if we have to spill one or 2% because of economy, because of security, one should gracefully accept that in the overall scheme of things. So I would say that, yes, it’s a challenge, that everybody is facing. Initially, there is no issue. Five percent, 10%, up to 30% is fine. Once you go beyond 30%, it’s a challenge. But that’s where our, big grid comes to our rescue. The storm doesn’t come throughout India in a very speed. It comes in one corner. Rest of the things, we can transfer the problems elsewhere and, that would be there. And then we should also be expanding our grid to the neighboring country. Larger the footprint, more safer you are. You can accommodate more, intermittent renewable, generation. That should be the mantra. So things are very simple. Expand your footprint as much as you can. Number one. Number two, make yourself flexible as much as you can. We have gone up to 55%. Why not to 40%? Why not even for a short duration if required 20%? Why not do start stop? Why nuclear should also not participate? Hydros are to participate. Gas has to part everybody has to participate. That’s the, thing. Flexibility has to come, including demand, as I mentioned. And then have robust transmission so that, when one part is in extreme, the rest of the country can, come to the rescue. So that’s also there. At the same time, market signals also have to be strong. India has already started seeing zero price during Sunday afternoon, but we were anticipating this maybe in 2014. I very vividly remember that, yes, it will come in 2014. Price has to become negative also. For consuming more consuming load, you will get money. So these are the signals. But then making only zero is not enough. The price in the peak hours has to go up so that people start, you know, restricting their consumer. And that’s how the load curve will become, more friendly to the renewables.

Shreya Jai: Right. So how, you know, realistic then is the idea of this intercurrent country grid at several levels in several global dialogues, that India is part of. We are trying to commit to a country to country grid and mostly aimed at, you know, deploying more renewable energy. How realistic do you think that idea is given the challenges we, anyway, are facing inside our own country?

S K Sooner: Yeah. So this is an FAQ to me, and I am a firm believer that OSOWOG is the right vision. Be it for energy transition, be it for decarbonization, be it for economy, for anything and everything, we must connect. Now you mentioned about India. India also, imagine if every state was separate and if it had to handle these things. I can tell you it is impossible to do it for any state separately because we have connected everyone together that we are able to do it. It has taken us almost thirty years. My lifetime, I have done this. But then now our next generation is taking benefits and, will enjoy the fruit and take it forward by connecting other groups. Now come to this, Nepal. We started There were all, you know, very small interconnections, then Mujaparpur, Dalke Bar, and, so many lines have are coming up. And Bhutan, Chuka, one small two twenty kV line. Now so many 400 kV lines have come. Tala and then, Kurichu and Punasanku and so many. Bangladesh started with one five hundred megawatt, then immediately another 500 megawatt, then from the, you know, Northeast, Tripura to Kamila. So the lines are getting built even now with, recent, I heard the announcement of, long, power from Middle East to Western, region in India. It will take time, but then interconnection is the way to go. That’s the way to take care of, intermittency. That’s the way to help each other. And if India could do for such a large grid, the neighboring grids will keep on connecting. How will it happen? What will be the size? What will be the investment? These are something which only time will tell. It’s very difficult to say anything. But in the process, technology will also change. See, the light HVDC has come. VSC has come. So gradually, undersea power system will also develop, in the, the, you know, the the European, undersea, Norway, UK, so many connections have come up. So I’m quite hopeful that, OSOWOG is the right slogan, right vision, and one should work towards this. And if integrating India could take thirty years, this thing will take another twenty or thirty years. But what in the in the whole life cycle, these are very small period, but the direction should be very clear. Having said so, there are issues. There are issues and issues. We know geopolitical issues. We know how the one part of the country gets, truncated because of other reasons. But then that’s always a case where that’s a different topic altogether. We have to make bouquet out of flowers within our reach, and our target should be to interconnect as much as we can.

Shreya Jai: Right. I would, you know, now move on to the concluding part of our discussion. I start with asking you what new interventions are required, you know, in terms of policy or technology to improve the functioning of the power, India’s power grid.

S K Sooner: Number of things to be done. I think, we should not, bask in glory and complacency that we have achieved. Yes. We have achieved, but lot more needs to be achieved. So the first thing first, transmission must continue to be strengthened. There should not be a feeling. Otherwise, we should never forget 2012. We should never forget Titanic’s sinking, so we need to keep on building our transmission. That’s the first thing I would say. The second is the work has to done in The States now. Central level, lot of work has been done, but it is the distribution level. It is the, systems and processes inside the state which is difficult. 30, kind 30 times we have to do that. And, I would say that institution capacity building, human capacity in the state is, not coming up the way it should be. And, now I keep going around in the states, and, the the policy makers, besides CapEx and investment must concentrate on human capacity building in true sense. So state level, we need to do a lot of work. The other thing is that, even in the regulatory commissions, a lot of more capacity needs to be done. Let’s say, for example, I’m very, but very much passionate about security constraint economic dispatch. And, I would just take thirty seconds to explain this. The whole life runs around two things. One is fear, another is greed. Fear is nothing but security, and greed is nothing but economics and economic dispatch. So the grid also runs on security and economic. Now to ensure security, is a big, big job. Continuous simulation, new kinds of equipment getting connected. What are the constraints which will get violated, when should you come into action. I think a lot more needs to be done in this way. Modeling simulation capability, data storage, data handling, retrieval, and AI and ML, all these are talked about, but we need to do a lot more than that. Then comes the rules and regulation. We have layered structure. We have a state level. We have distribution level, then regional, then national. There are many things which have to be handled in a very cohesive fashion. So one cannot run the entire grid from one place centrally. The grid is collectively controlled and democratically stabilized. We need security constraint economic dispatch right from distribution companies to state level, to the regional level, to the national level. And that is how the prices will converge, including markets. So market and regulated both have to also be coupled together. Then we will have, what you call, most optimum grid and most, optimal price discovery. And then the and and and the reforms have to continue for quite some time. The rules for the interconnections, the the queue for interconnection, and the way, the flexibility has to be monitored, the way the demand response has to be introduced, the way the prices have to be the market regulations have to change.We need a lot of black belt experts in market, in system operation, and in regulation.

Shreya Jai:  And just very quickly, you know, how would you think the impact of all these new kind of market instruments that are coming in will impact the grid? Or would there be any impact? We’re looking at futures market, derivatives market in the power sector. Do you think that it would have any significant impact on the grid, or this is just the market getting bigger and bolder and probably better?

S K Sooner: Yeah. So let’s be very clear. In Seagate, we have two streams. One is called c two, that is power system operation, and c five, market operation. So c two and c five were parallelly working for a decade till, say, 2010. And I I was a member of c three c two and then c five. And then in the world, we decided that c two and c five, there has to be a common. The system our system operation can disturb market operation, and market operation can also disturb system operation. The physical system is a reality. Market can influence that also. That is why that when we say financial market, we say talk of derivative. It is to be understood that the underlying variable is the physical system. Otherwise, why were we waiting for such a long time? So whenever whatever instrument we introduce, which we should and it’s a very, most welcome decision that, we are now introducing derivatives, but underlying variable has to be very, very strong or robust, which cannot be manipulated because derivatives will work on the logarithmic scale. 10 times of physical market. Huge money will be riding on it. So the everything will be settled on the reference price. What reference price? Do you take a reference price which can be manipulated on which people have less trust? So I am a strong votary of coupling the economic dispatch prices, which we call system marginal price, and market clearing price of all exchanges and variety of products so that there is one index which is robust, which nobody can rig, nobody can manipulate. And once we get that, then, you know, derivatives, they will people with other walks of life, particularly from finance and risk appetite people, then you come up with innovative products. But undermining the physical, underlying variable, I my view would be very shortsighted. So that’s all what I have to say on the derivative. There are a lot of things. There is a hype. But, first, let’s put our things with a solid background. In the initial stages, if you don’t do this, you will, run a little faster, but then you will get stuck the way we have got in our power exchanges. We are not able to even reach 10% in power exchange even after decade and a half. But in derivative, we should not make this mistake. So we should have our energy is all doable. We have done it. We have done the simulation and everything. There are conflict of interest. There are vested interest. But then the regulator and policy makers have to see everything that what will be good for the country must have a robust underlying variable reference price. That’s my very strong, recommendation, for the derivatives of the financial market, which is coming up.

Shreya Jai:  Right. And just to wrap this conversation up, how would you rate the resilience of India’s electricity grid against all the new changes that are happening? We see grid accidents happening in The US. Too much heat, you know, led to a meltdown. There was a blackout in Spain. This was because there was sudden outflow of renewable energy. Looking at all these global, incidents, how would you rate India’s, resilience of India’s electricity grid and how, you know, strong we are against all the changes that are happening?

S K Sooner: Yeah. So we are good. There is no doubt about it. We are resilient, but no room for complacency. We should, hear, listen, study, read what is going on throughout the world. Every accident which happens should be very deeply analyzed that do we have such a thing? I can see what happened in Spain, like, the, Peninsula. Same thing can happen in India also. That’s why we need a stronger interconnection. The flexibility, we we have to keep on increasing our flexibility. Whenever I’ll tell you in the morning now, when I do yoga, the instructor tells I said that my body is very flexible. When when he starts asking me to touch my back spine, I can’t do that. And that’s where my inflexibility, starts showing up. So in the grade, we have to have flexibility which is tested, which is demonstrated. And we need flexibility in every part. And it could be in transmission. It could be in generation. It could be in pricing. It could be in demand. It could be even in regulation and policy making. They also have to be flexible, keep changing it. So there is resilience. There is no end. It’s a journey. It’s a continuum, and, we have to be live to this. The new kind of loads which are coming up, IVRs, the kind of hydrogen electrolyzers will come, the kind of data centers. I’ll tell you I am so worried about data center. Nobody has understood what the data center is, even in the world. So data center design itself should be so that it becomes also flexible. So lot more to do, and, it’s a happening time. It’s a happening place in India, and we should, have no complacency, not bask in glory. We have done well. We are resilient, but, Titanic can sink. So one has to be very careful about it. And if something happens, how do we resilience? How do we quickly restore? That also is equally important. So not many things to do, but we are on the right track. India is good doing good. We will continue to do good. We would have we have to concentrate on our, intrinsic capability, be it make in India, be it, human resources, be it, technology, be it even systems and processes, everything. And then finally, you know, we keep discussing that we should have a UPI in power sector. The way we have done in finance that through mobile, I am able to transfer. Same thing should be we should be able to do it in power also. So lot more to do. Lot more to do. Thank you.

Shreya Jai: And how much of a, challenge heat and, climate change related impacts infrastructure. Heat is becoming a major issue, and there are always concerns during the same ones that we are sitting in and when temperature crosses 45, 48 degrees Celsius about, you know, how extreme heat will impact the infrastructure, how several climate related climate change related impacts, would have on the grid. Do you want to address that?

S K Sooner: Oh, yeah. Of course. You know, we can’t, you know, be stationary. Starting from seismic zones, the way we designed our transmission towers, today, now they have to be relooked because things have moved. We were not having transmission lines on the coast side, but today, we are going in for, coastal side also on transmission. Similarly, temperature, the whole thing has to be hardened. Whole thing has to be hardened. For example, you know, the weatherization of the power plants, the way we have seen it in Texas. So we would also have to weatherize our each and every power plant. And then we have high demand. We should be able to introduce demand response and, you know, able to ride through such a temporary problems. But climate change is happening be it in terms of floods, be it in terms of cyclones, be it in terms of, you know, heavy monsoon or high temperature, sensitive air conditioning. Our comfort is increasing. Very recently, we found that the minimum temperature of AC has been raised. So like this, there has to be many, many interventions, to take care of, the impact of climate on supply side, on load side, on systems and procedures. And we have to take load as a part of the equation, not only supply side. That is too expensive. So we are on the right track, but it’s such a big system. We have we need much more energy, much more people, much more black belt operators, black belt planners, and the regulators who can understand both market and system, and then public policy and the climate issue in a very holistic fashion. Thank you very much.

Shreya Jai: Thank you so much. And this was also a very holistic conversation. You covered everything, and no could no one could have explained it much better. Thank you for covering every topic that I could think of, but I’m sure there’s a lot to discuss. And I hope we could have you sometime back again. But thank you for this conversation. It was great speaking with you as always.

S K Sooner: Thank you very much. It’s such a topic that one life is not enough. One line is life is too small for covering this topic. Thank you very much.

Shreya Jai: Yes. The topic is just like the India’s grid, connected to various issues, different states, variety of problems, variety of challenges, but a great way ahead, I’m sure. Yeah. So thank you again. Thank you.

S K Sooner: Thank you.

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