IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2020 - 24

repositories to access these data, making the whole process
extremely time consuming and fraught with risk.
Once ready, the DPR is scrutinized by several agencies/
departments, each of which reviews and approves its respective aspects, such as hydrology and power potential, overall
planning of the scheme, geological setting and constraints,
component sizes (including the generating equipment and
auxiliaries), project schedule, and estimated cost. Each subapproval is processed in sequence, making the whole process time consuming and resource intensive. In some cases,
the subjectivity or personal preferences of the approving
officer result in a very frustrating experience for the developer. Although the CEA may agree that the scheme and cost
estimate help the developer in subsequent stages of project
implementation, the hydro sector would benefit from a more
coordinated and structured approach to this whole process,
which is quite complex.
Securing approval of environment-related aspects is usually even more challenging, as is the case in many countries.
India has, over the years, tried to streamline the environment
and forest approval process, but the involvement of many
stakeholders and government agencies continues to pose significant challenges in obtaining these clearances. For example, a few years ago, as part of the streamlining process, the
Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change initiated a program whereby the scope of work for the Environment Impact Assessment and Environment Mitigation Plan
studies was decided upfront for each project. As a result, the
studies remained aligned with Ministry expectations, and
surprises during clearance hearings were to a large extent
avoided. Over the years, however, many frequent changes
have been made to the regulations, and hydro developers
have found difficult to follow and conform to these. Riparian
releases and their measurement is one such regulation that
has kept the developers on their toes in recent years.
To make matters more challenging for developers, even
for an environmentally cleared project, activists have the
option of judicial recourse by filing a public interest litigation with the National Green Tribunal. This recourse has
been used in many recent cases and led to costly delays and
time overruns for hydropower developers. In some cases, the
delays were so profound that the project became unviable
and was abandoned.

Land Acquisition
Land acquisition has been another key reason for delays
in hydropower projects. Ideally, land acquisition should be
completed before a project is tendered. In India, however,
projects are often awarded when only part of the land is
physically acquired.
With the new policy, the cost of land acquisition has gone
up significantly, and the process has also become very complex. Being location specific, hydropower projects usually
provide very limited flexibility in terms of absorbing major
changes in the footprint and consequent land requirement.
24

ieee power & energy magazine

In most areas where hydropower facilities may be built,
the land belongs to the community and/or is owned jointly by
families who may have off-the-record agreements. Acquisition
becomes extremely complicated, as compensation is granted to
the people who have ownership on record but who may have
a written lien on the land. This situation adds to the litigation
and complexity in the compensation distribution. Furthermore,
the unavailability of reliable land records with the concerned
government departments, particularly in the Northeastern part
of the country, often adds to existing complexities.

Construction-Related Challenges
Hydro projects generally involve complex, heavy civil works
and pose significant construction challenges worldwide. In
India, the challenges are magnified by the relatively poor geology underlying many projects that remain to be developed.
As noted, most of the remaining hydropower potential lies
in the Northern and Northeastern regions, where the terrain
comprises high hills and deep valleys belonging to the Himalayan ranges. The Himalayas are one of the world's most geologically and seismically active mountain ranges with a geology that is, at best, difficult. Young and weak rock masses are
undergoing intense tectonic activity and, as a result, exhibit
major faults, folds, and other discontinuities. In these circumstances, even a thoroughly investigated project gets exposed
to unexpected subsurface conditions, which often become
very difficult and expensive to negotiate. Many past and
recent hydro projects have suffered significant schedule and
cost overruns that can be attributed to adverse geology. Engineers' and contractors' lack of experience and preparedness
to handle these surprises has only added to the projects' woes.
Lack of sophistication on the part of owners and contractors
has also not helped.
In other parts of the world, potential adverse geological
conditions are addressed through forward-thinking contracts, in which geological baseline reports (GBRs) constitute an important contractual document. A GBR specifies
the known ground conditions in a project site and defines
the range of adverse ground conditions the contractor should
consider in the bid/contract price. During the execution of
the contract, any site condition that differs from those considered in the GBR is treated as unforeseen and is paid for
through an agreed change mechanism. Disputes related to
unforeseen ground conditions, which are almost always difficult to predict, are thus avoided. Although lately this concept has gained acceptance in the hydro industry worldwide,
its application and resulting contract management are still in
the exploratory stage in the Indian context.

Project Financing and Power Purchase
Agreements
Because of the factors discussed previously (and many others),
hydro projects tend to be significantly more expensive to
develop than other projects. They are also characterized by
higher upfront costs to address greater complexities in design
september/october 2020

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2020