IAC Webinar on Real Time Electricity Market, April 28, 2020, New Delhi

On April 28, IAC organized a webinar along with PowerGen (ITEN/Clarion) on Real Time Electricity Markets (RTM) featuring IAC Member Companies and senior leadership of Government of India, RISE and IAC. The panel discussion was moderated by IAC Convenor and included the following:

• Mr. PK Agarwal, Director (Market Operations) and CISO, POSOCO, Government of India
• Mr. Abhishek Ranjan, AVP, Network Operations, BSES Rajdhani Pvt. Ltd.
• Mr. Arun Kumar, CEO, Kreate Energy
• Mr. Anish Mandal, Director - Consulting, Deloitte and GTG RISE Program

GTG RISE program has been working closely with Central Electricity Regulatory Commission on redesigning Indian Power Market (Real Time, Day-Ahead and Ancillary) and RTM is a step in that direction. The event was attended by over 750 participants from the renewables and grid integration sector including senior representatives from US and Indian Government, and Corporate sector from around the world. The event was highly successful and widely reported on social media. The audience asked over 100 questions during the webinar.

Some of the key takeaways from the webinar were as follows:

• India’s power sector is currently in a transitional phase, shifting from long-term generation contracts to a greater reliance on short-term contracts and electricity spot markets.
• The need of the hour is RTM. Establishing RTM in India is expected to not only facilitate the smooth integration of variable renewable but also bring greater market efficiency and enable better resource utilization in the country.
• To achieve the main objective of RTM, the essential requirement is real time data such as generating station-wise installed capacity, declared capacity, schedule (including all revisions), Un-Requisitioned Surplus, generator-wise variable cost, optimization up/down, part-load compensation (if payable), discom/ constituent-wise share in respective generating stations and requisition (day-ahead and last revision) from the generating stations.
• In RTM, the timelines of 7/8 time blocks is applicable for Inter-state generator/entity, whereas in the Intrastate level intra state generating companies would continue to self-schedule based on earlier time line of 4 time blocks.
• The real-time market will come into effect from June 1, 2020.
• The implementation framework of RTM was presented by GTG RISE program.

An interesting feature of webinar was an interactive poll where audience was asked about their opinion on the Real Time Electricity Market. A total of 418 webinar attendees participated in the poll and the insights from that are as follows: