India can integrate 175 GW of RE into electricity grid, reveals study

Power Minister Piyush Goyal released the first part of the study ‘Pathways to integrate 175 Gigawatts of renewable energy into India’s Electricity Grid’ at an event. The second volume takes a more in-depth look at system operations in the Western and Southern regions.

The study, developed under the US-India bilateral program ‘Greening the Grid’, confirms the technical and economic viability of integrating 175 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy (RE) into India’s power grid by 2022, and identifies future course of actions that are favourable for such integration. The Indian government in 2015 had set the ambitious target of adding 100 GW of solar energy and 60 GW of wind energy into the country’s energy mix.

The report resolves many questions about how India’s electricity grid can manage the variability and uncertainty of adding large amounts of renewable energy into the grid. The results demonstrate that power system balancing with 100 GW solar and 60 GW wind is achievable at 15-minute operational timescales with minimal reduction in renewable energy output. India’s current coal-dominated power system has the inherent flexibility to accommodate the variability associated with the targeted renewable energy capacities.