The government launched a pan-India real-time market of electricity to enable the buyers and sellers pan-India to meet their energy requirement closer to real time of operation. Its shorter bidding time, faster scheduling, and defined processes enables the participants to access resources throughout the all India grid, promoting competition.
Key Points
- It is an organized market platform which will bring required flexibility to provide real time balance while ensuring optimal utilization of the available surplus capacity in the system.
- It opens for 30 minutes in a day, and buyers and sellers would have the option of placing buy or sell bids for each 15-minute time block.
- It also helps to manage diversity in the demand pattern in the country with a market at national level.
Benefits
- It would help to mitigate challenges of grid management
- It would help to integrate higher amounts of renewable energy resources into the grid.
- It would provide an alternate mechanism for Discoms to access larger markets at competitive prices.
- It manage its power purchase portfolio more optimally and result in cost optimisation of power purchase.
- It serve the consumers with reliable supply as any last-minute requirement of power can easily be bought from the Real Time market.
How is it different from traditional power trade?
- Earlier grid was managed by load shedding at the last minute.
- Provides market to sell the surplus energy
- Manages the transmission and distribution efficiently.
Thus, the real time market is a win-win for all stakeholders. The launch has marked the second reform in the power sector after the announcement of the plans for privatisation of the all electricity distribution companies.