India’s green energy sector may be hit by power regulator’s stricter performance standards
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.A regulatory effort to keep the national power grid stable and make green power more reliable may wreck the revenues of producers and potentially lead to tariff hikes, industry executives warned. The regulator has proposed steep penalties for companies which are under- or over-producing power, rattling solar and wind power firms dependent on the vagaries of weather.In the power sector, a deviation settlement mechanism (DSM) penalizes producers when what they deliver to discoms differs from what they promised.
The Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) has set a tolerance band of 10% for wind power and 5% for solar. Essentially, this means a company producing above or below these thresholds is liable to pay steep penalties.
Earlier, these bands were more relaxed—15% for wind and 10% for solar. On 1 March, the CERC also introduced a new formula to make the regime progressively stricter over the next five years, alarming the industry struggling to sign power purchase agreements (PPAs), even as they face generation cuts and distress sales on exchanges.According to developers, the new deviation rules are hard to follow, since unlike coal or hydro, wind and solar are unstable sources of power.
According to the National Solar Energy Federation of India, the penalties may cause revenue losses of up to 48% in the case of wind power and 11.1% in the case of solar power, compared to 1-3% losses under the old mechanism.On 27 April, the Karnataka High Court stayed the plan till 10 June, after the National Solar Energy Federation of India challenged the CERC order. However, worries remain.The chief financial officer at one of India's largest renewable energy companies said, “A survey of
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