As part of India’s Green Energy Corridor scheme, the Ministry of Power has proposed setting up a host of Renewable Energy Management Centres (REMCs) across the country to help integrate renewables as their penetration increases. The centres will cost around INR4.09 billion (US$63.5 million).
With a 160GW target of solar and wind by 2022, the ministry is concerned about grid stability and security. It noted that seven states will account for 104GW (65%) of this capacity including: Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan.
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The newly proposed REMCs would therefore be separated into the Southern, Western and Northern regions across the seven major resource rich states and various projects of the Green Energy Corridor scheme.
Existing control centres, known as state load dispatch centres (SLDCs) currently lack renewable energy forecasting systems, scheduling, monitoring and reserve management abilities.
To alleviate this problem, India aims to emulate state-of-the-art renewables forecasting and monitoring systems already successfully operating in countries like Spain, Germany, US, Denmark, Belgium and Australia.
The REMCs’ functions include:
- Forecast renewable energy generation at state and regional levels
- Schedule renewable generation with real time tracking and SCADA systems
- Coordinate with the relevant load dispatch centre
Power Grid Corporation of India Limited (PGCIL) has already worked on similar control centre projects and has therefore been assigned the implementation role. On completion, PGCIL will hand the REMCs over to the states.
The projects are to be implemented within 15 months of award and commissioned progressively through 2018/19.
PGCIL recently entered in to a loan agreement of up to US$500 million with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) partly for one of its Green Energy Corridor projects.
