The Government of India’s Ministry of Power has released Guidelines to Promote Development of Pump Storage Projects.
Draft guidelines were circulated for comments and suggestions in February 2023, and the input received was used to inform the final guidelines.
Citing the fact that the increasing presence of variable and intermittent renewable energy sources like solar and wind in the mix, the report said, “This presents a grid-level challenge for stability and a need for addressing the temporal considerations in power availability. Storage and ancillary services would be the attributes that require incentivization in the power system to ensure appropriate capacity.”
Thus, comprehensive storage guidelines were developed to set the direction of developments in this regard. “Amongst the various technologies available for addressing this requirement of storage and ancillary services, Pumped Storage Projects (PSPS) are clean, MW scale, domestically available, time tested and internationally accepted,” the report said.
“lndia is on the path toward a clean energy transition, guided by Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) targets, to reduce the emission intensity of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 45% by 2030, get to 50% of installed capacity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030 and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2070. The development of PSPs is of paramount importance for providing greater inertia and balancing power to the grid.”
The long-term approach to the development of pumped storage projects will be driven by various factors regarding the requirement of the grid to achieve the energy transition, the report said. The Central Electricity Authority estimated the country will require 26.7 GW of PSPs and 47.2 GW of battery energy storage (5 hours) to integrate the renewable energy capacity envisaged until 2032. The PSP capacity requirement may further increase if the cost of BESS does not come down as expected. CEA said it will continue modelling and forecasting the energy demand and energy mix over the long term and providing an indication of the probable requirement of the various forms of storage.
One of the annexes to the report contains a list of 55 identified PSP sites across the country, with total generating capacity of 73,420 MW.
