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India's power system is no longer struggling to generate enough electricity. It is struggling to generate it at the right time, as per a new paper by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister.
The paper said the defining problem for the Indian grid has shifted from capacity to flexibility, and three market signals show just how acute the mismatch between solar and non-solar hours has become. The first signal is playing out in prices. According to the EAC-PM, the intraday spread between solar hours and non-solar hours has widened to a peak-to-trough ratio approaching nine. The gap would be even wider, the report notes, but for the market's price ceiling. In practical terms, power is plentiful and cheap in the middle of the day when solar output peaks, and turns scarce and expensive in the evening when the sun sets but demand stays high. The second signal is showing up in reliability. The council found that the "grid's failures to meet demand rise overwhelmingly in the non-solar hours, relative to solar hours,". During the day, when solar is generating, the system largely copes. The stress builds after sunset, when solar drops off sharply and the grid has too few flexible resources to ramp up quickly and fill the gap. The third signal is visible in wasted clean energy. The report says solar is being curtailed in large volumes because it cannot be consumed the moment it is produced. The scale of the loss is significant. The paper estimates that average daily solar curtailment in May 2026 was equivalent to electricity that could have powered more than a quarter of Delhi for a full day. Together, the three trends point to a grid that is flush with solar power for a few hours and then short of it for the rest. The council argues this is not a generation problem but a timing problem, and it will grow as India adds more solar. The report said addressing it will require a shift in how power is planned and distributed across the day, with greater emphasis on storing midday surplus and moving demand into solar hours. Without that, the paper warns, the price volatility, evening shortages and curtailment seen today will only intensify as the solar fleet expands. (ANI)
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