Interviews

The Indian power sector is undergoing important changes that are redefining the industry outlook. Persistent economic growth continues to drive power demand in India. The government had taken various initiatives in order to achieve the power generation target for FY2016.

Under the strong leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, I got the opportunity to head the Heavy Industries Ministry in which BHEL comes under my purview. If you analyse BHEL´s financial progress in the past two-three years, the company has been under tremendous pressure, mainly due to the coal scam that shook India.

If you see, the Ministry of Power has flagged off 14 pilots on Smart Grid that they want to mobilise through tried and tested methods. Of the 14 pilots, one is already awarded in Mysore, and others are on their way. The pilots have all the functionalities of the Smart Grid starting from renewable integration to demand side management, peak load reduction and power quality

For IT consulting companies like us, there are a lot of opportunities on the analytics front. When Smart Grids are implemented through various applications, there will be a huge amount of data generated from applications like MDMS etc.

Success is subjective and we are trying our level best to get more transparency in the black diamond sector. To start with, we are looking at one billion tonne of coal production from the current level of 500 million tonne in the next five years.

Our sector is one where you have long gestation periods and one can´t see results overnight. The last year has been a mixed bag; as they say, ´you win some, you lose some!´ Clearly, there have been positive initiatives from the new government, such as improvement in coal production, efforts to partially mitigate the problem of stranded gas-based generation, proposed changes in the Electricity Act, etc.

Globally, the success of solar energy deployment has been completely dependent on certain external factors. India is no different. With an encouraging 2013, the industry was more confident about the next couple of years. However, with issues like key administrative changes and anti-dumping concerns, the investment decision was stalled by some international players.

The renewable energy sector in India started during 1989 and has since increased its capacity to over 33,000 MW. It´s rapid growth has attracted a large pool of manpower into this sector and the industry has been quiet successful in generating the required talent.

The overall power scenario in India in terms of conventional energy is such that coal and gas are still the largest contributors. However, wind energy is the fastest moving alternate energy source with around 20-25 GW of installed capacity today.