Erratic monsoons threaten power sector!!

I think India badly needs a Proper energy infrastructure in place but then without proper infrastructure and system in place it is very difficult to analyse how much power is consumed and what is the reason and what will be the demand in future...

I think every household electricity demand is going up and i guess the per capita household electricity use has grown faster than the per capita income in India, and here we are facing the problem, where now states are over drawing power and this is creating problem, so a Proper energy infrastructure should be in place where people will be involved in planning these things on a prior basis and not after thought which most of the time we see.

And also Governement should focus more on renewable resources and in this regard  India will be launching a solar power target by September 2009, which could increase the output from almost nothing to a staggering 20GW by 2020.

Due to its vantage location in Indian Ocean, India is blessed with south west monsoon[winds] and copious summer monsoon rainfall.  But it is true the vagaries of monsoon in space and time place an important role in economic growth of our country. Regarding Power generation most of the hydel power generating station located in westernghats area and in Khaslihilss and Eastern himalayas {except few places} got NORMAL to sufficient rainfall for power production.

But one must note that during SW monsoon the wind force is so great and even in some of vantage locations the speed exceeds 40kmph [38 knots] and this wind energy is greatly available in Tamilnadu, Gujarat. 

This energy can be properly tapped which may sometime exceed 100mw.

the companies should try to make up the production in the later months,yes what has happened we cannot help .

other sources should be tapped as suggested by some.tidal,wind,solar,nuclear.etc

India ia a big and diverse country and there are different resources in abundance at different places. For example the lack of mansoon has put generation from Hydro plants in difficulty.

Similarly we may see some problem as of yet unforseen in the thermal sector due to non availibility of the coal or the quality of the coal required, in that case we should be focussing on using our low grade coal more efficiently and in such cases fulidised boilers can be of help.

So Also in the case of nuclear power we have now some things in place for the fuel but we had major problems in the last 25 years and we dont know as to that will be real smooth in furure as politics is more important and the most important part is Self Sufficiency, which is lacking in all the energy generation ventures as we are dependent on some external source for some important i9nput as some place or the other.

Regarding non conventional energy generation they are yet to get of the amrk in the real sence and presently the availibility situations for wind mills are not even fully understood as they are dependent on climatic conditions, similary as they grom in size their integration and failure can lead to grid unstability and problems un anticipated.

So with solar, gas turbines, and what ever else we can think off, so we have problems in every place or sector and in such cases the best is to have distributed generation with a combination of multiple generation technologies in use at a single location so that they can supplement each other and in times of crisis we may not see a full breakdown,

The combination can be selected based on the resources available for example in the high sunshine areas we can have solar and thermal combination, similary for the hills we can have hydel, solar and wind, along the gas rich regions we can gas turbines with a combination od solar or wind or nuclear.

So the palnning for the selection of the technologies can be more important for the future stability of the power system and its growth.