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Alok Kumar, Former Power Secretary highlights Policy and Regulatory Challenges in Power Sector
Jan 22, 2025
Alok Kumar, Former Power Secretary Government of India addressed CERC's Silver Jubilee Lecture on India’s energy transition. The talk covered actions to tackle climate change across global, national, and state levels, along with key challenges in affordability, grid management, and utility viability.
Key points that emerged after the discussion were:
- CERC should come out with a vision and periodic road map for proposed regulatory interventions to provide visibility about future reforms for deepening of market-based electricity procurement.
- After implementation of GNA regulations in which grid charges are paid only by load side and the current framework of NCT driving the investment decisions for new transmission lines, there are concerns that payers do not have adequate say in the costs being committed in grid expansion on generators side, particularly RE plants. This requires a more holistic examination of cost justification of large investments.
- Transmission charge waiver for new power plants should not be extended beyond the June 2025 deadline as it acts against the local and decentralised RE development, resulting into overall higher landed costs.
- CERC can facilitate innovation and research-based policy advocacy by mandating disclosure of data relating to actual operations in public domain after a cooling off period, say six months.
- There is a need to come out with simple to use and comprehensive regulations for grid scale storage assets.