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August 2017
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Nexus big (The Total Investment & Insurance
Solutions)
Acute
shortage of water in India, particularly following the years there is low
rainfall during the monsoon season, has started hurting its energy production
badly. Electricity generation in the country is heavily dependent on coal-fired
thermal plants and hydropower projects, which require consistent supply of
large volumes of water to operate at optimal levels. Any disruption in water
supply affects production and leads to power outages. The Total Investment & Insurance Solutions
For
instance, water shortage related shutdowns in 2016 cost India roughly 14
terawatt-hours (TWh) of thermal electricity generation, enough to power
neighbour Sri Lanka for an entire year, according to research by the World
Resources Institute (WRI).
The
Washington-based research organisation compiled and analysed over 1,400 daily
outage reports filed with the Central Electricity Authority between 2013 and
2016 to arrive at this conclusion.
The loss of
generation has significantly increased over the past three years from 1,258
million units in 2014-15 to 4,989 million units in 2015-16 and to 5,870 million
units between April 2016 and January 2017, Energy Minister Piyush Goyal told
Parliament in March.
In 2016, as
many as 18 thermal power plants had to lie idle for various lengths of time due
to water shortages. If these plants had water supply during the shutdowns, they
could have generated 14 TWh of electricity, about one per cent of the country's
annual consumption, WRI's analysis showed.
During the
four years from 2013 through 2016, the thermal power sector lost more than 30
TWh of potential electricity due to water scarcity, Tianyi Luo, Research
Associate at WRI's Water Programme, wrote in a recent report. The Total Investment & Insurance
Solutions
It is
worrying that most of the shutdowns happened between March and September, the
hottest months in South Asia when demand for electricity is high not only for
domestic and industrial use but also to irrigate farms during the main cropping
season. "In other words, electricity generation was the most hampered when
people needed it the most," Tianyi said.
Although
India is taking big steps to expand its renewable energy capacity, its power
sector remains reliant mostly on thermal plants, which have a high water
demand, mainly for washing coal and then for the boilers, from which the steam
is funnelled to turn the power generation turbines.
India
depends on coal for about 60 per cent of its energy needs and aims to double
its output to 1.5 billion tonnes by 2020, according to Niti Aayog, the government's
policy think tank. It means that droughts, which last occurred in 2016, can
lead to prolonged power outages, hamstringing the economy and endangering
livelihoods. The Total Investment &
Insurance Solutions
Climate
change is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of droughts, and
socio-economic development will intensify local water competition. "In the
coming decades, we expect more water shortage-induced power shutdowns, unless
steps are taken to reduce these risks," WRI said.
To reduce
water requirement in thermal power plants, there has been a move to install
closed cycle systems in new plants instead of the once-through cooling systems,
the Energy Ministry has said. Existing thermal power plants can also reduce
water risk by adopting less water-dependent cooling technologies, such as dry
cooling. The Total Investment &
Insurance Solutions
Power plants
are using other measures to conserve water such as installing ash water
recirculation system, stopping discharge from ash pond effluents, adopting high
and medium concentration ash slurry disposal systems, maintaining of high cycle
of concentration in cooling towers and use of cooling tower blow down for
disposal of bottom ash. The Total
Investment & Insurance Solutions
These
measures have helped bring down the total water requirement in a closed cycle
system for a thermal power plant from seven cubic metres per MWh to about three
cubic metres.
But,
considering the future water demand from upcoming thermal power plants and
sectors like agriculture and domestic use, reducing water consumption in power
plants will have only a short-term effect in improving overall water balance of
the country, says a 2016 policy brief by The Energy and Resources Institute
(TERI). The Total Investment &
Insurance Solutions
Adopting a
more comprehensive approach, thermal power plants must be asked to reduce the
water footprints (rather than consumption) of their operations, said the brief
titled Water Neutral Electricity Production in India: Avoiding the
Unmanageable.
To assess
vulnerability of thermal power plants to water scarcity, there is need for
detailed plant-level water withdrawal and consumption data, says WRI, which is
working on a methodology by using satellite imagery to develop a water usage
database for thermal power plants.
As demand
for energy grows and climate change impacts water availability and timing, this
kind of analysis will become vital for all countries, Tianyi said.The Total Investment & Insurance
Solutions
