Challenges for CO₂ Management Through Renewable Energy, Conventional Power and System Reliability in Indian Power Sector

Abstract

The subject of integration of renewable sources of energy, namely wind and solar (mainly) into the grid, has assumed significance in view of the fact that the renewable sources of power are now being adopted on a large scale to bring down the generation of huge quantities of CO₂ from fossil-fired power plants. Govt. of India has set grand targets of renewable energy source capacity additions. More proportion of renewable energy in the grid creates the problem of grid security and reliability issues. To avoid any load shedding into system due to variable nature of the RE sources, the higher ramping up and ramping down rates per minutes are required to be incorporated in the existing and new coal-/gas-fired conventional power plants. Further, the standards of minimum loading of the thermal power plants without oil support need to be brought down from the present value of 55% to further lower values to save on the import of huge quantities of diesel and crude oil and consequent drains of foreign exchange. The new technologies to ignite the coal directly are now commercially available internationally. These would need to be seriously considered. All these aspects have been discussed in the paper in detail so that there could be smooth change over from the present scenario of low renewable to high renewable and consequently prepare a solid ground for accepting without problem areas a higher share of renewable energy into our system.