IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2020 - 21

The government has realized that India's
high dependency on thermal generation sources
poses a serious threat to energy security in
terms of fuel availability, long-run economic
viability, and, more importantly, environmental sustainability. To honor its nationally determined contribution for climate change, India
has targeted adding 175 GW of renewable power by 2022. In addition, the government has
pledged that, by 2030, non-fossil-fuel sources
will constitute 40% of the nation's total powergeneration capacity. This latter target would
be difficult to achieve without bringing hydro
into the equation.

The Advantages of Hydropower

table 1. The total installed capacity in India (in megawatts)-
March 2020.
Sector

Thermal

Nuclear

Hydro

RES
(MNRE)

Grand
Total

State

74,216

26,959

2,357

103,532

Private

86,875

3,394

82,770

173,039

Central

69,718

6,780

15,347

1,632

93,477

Total

230,810

6,780

45,699

86,759

370,048

100

Values are rounded to the nearest whole megawatt or percentage of
regional total. (Source: CEA website, http://cea.nic.in/reports/monthly/
installedcapacity/2020/installed_capacity-03.pdf.)

The Current Indian Perspective
From India's current perspective, hydropower offers several
unique features in addition to its traditional benefits.
✔ Sustainability: Hydropower is recognized as a sustainable source of clean power and has an important
role to play in India's goal to achieve the targeted 40%
power generation through non-fossil-fuel sources
by 2030.
✔ Flood control: Most of the precipitation on the Indian
subcontinent occurs during the monsoon months. Severe flooding is a common annual feature in many
northern and northeastern states and results in unacceptable loss of life and property year after year. Several identified and well-studied hydro projects include
flood moderation as an important aspect. It is in the
national interest that project developers be suitably incentivized to develop these projects.
✔ Grid stability: The ongoing and proposed massive
penetration of intermittent power sources-wind and
solar-in the Indian power system makes the development of hydro (including pumped storage hydro)
almost indispensable for mitigating grid instability issues. The lessons learned from many renewable-rich
countries indicate that hydro (including pumped storage hydro) provides one of the most sustainable solutions for grid-scale balancing capacity.
✔ Peaking power: Hydro's role in meeting power demands
in peak periods is well known. Ongoing and upcoming
changes in the energy mix-including the inevitable
long-term retirement of coal-based generation and an
increase of intermittent sources-would put additional
emphasis on using hydro and pumped hydro plants to
help shave diurnal peaks in the power demand.

Other Traditional Advantages
In addition to the benefits described previously, the country would inherently benefit from the following hydro-specific features.
september/october 2020

As of December
2010

As of December
2019

169,749 MW

367,280 MW
Total

65%

63%
Thermal

22%

12%
Hydro

10%

23%
Renewable

2%
Nuclear

figure 3. The evolution of India's power mix from
2010 to 2019.
✔ Black start capability: Hydropower plants need only

a relatively small source of power for startup/lighting
up an idle plant. This allows system operators to provide auxiliary power to other generation sources that
could take hours or even days to start.
✔ Reliability of power: River flows can generally be
predicted reliably using long-term historical data. As
a result, power generation from a hydro plant can be
predicted more reliably than generation from wind
and solar plants.
✔ Low operating cost: Hydropower plants have a low
operating cost-in some cases, it is less than half that
of thermal power plants.
✔ Long economic life: The plant life of hydropower projects is normally in the range of 40-50 years. In fact,
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IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2020

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