In a bid to further deepen the electricity trade in India, Power Minister RK Singh on Monday launched the green day-ahead market (GDAM).
The launch will also provide competitive price signals, besides offering an opportunity to the market participants to trade in green energy, in the most transparent, flexible, competitive, and efficient manner, the Power Ministry said in a statement.
“We are opening doors for renewable energy. In this new era of continuous reforms including the launch of GDAM today, any interested party can set up and sell renewable energy,” Singh said during the launch.
“Benefits of free ISTS (inter-State transmission system) will be available for renewable energy and open access will be available within 15 days,” Singh said. He further added that the big industries can go green and the government would make efforts to make business simpler and GDAM is a step in that direction.
The minister further stated that the country needs to decrease its dependence on imported sources of fossil fuel. He added that the Centre is working to implement the Green Hydrogen Mission under the leadership of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“The market-based competitive prices will provide another option to renewable generators to sell power as well as accelerate the renewable capacity addition towards the Government’s vision of building India as a sustainable and efficient energy economy. The distribution utilities would also be able to sell surplus renewable power generated in their area. The obligated entities (distribution licensee, open access consumers and captive power consumers) would also be able to meet the RPO target by directly buying green power from the power exchange(s). The non-obligated entities will be able to buy power on a voluntary basis and help increase the share of green power,” the release said.
Integrated way
In addition, the release said that the GDAM will operate in an integrated way with the conventional day-ahead market. The Exchanges will offer the market participants to submit bids together for both conventional and renewable energy through the separate bidding windows.
“The clearance will take place in a sequential manner - renewable energy bids will be cleared first in accordance with the must run status of the renewables, followed by conventional segment. This mechanism will allow renewable energy sellers to subsequently bid in the conventional segment should their bids remain uncleared in the green market. There will be separate price discoveries for both the conventional and renewables,” it added.
Meanwhile, Singh while responding to a media query said there would be no power shortage in the country. The statement comes at a time when thermal power plants are facing coal shortage across the country.
“There won’t be any back down...There was no outage yesterday. There was no power shortage and it did not happen even before. If there is some outage, then that is because of states’ constraints,” he said while further adding that the power plants in the country have more than 8 million tonnes of coal at present.
The Minister also informed that around ₹16,000 crore has not been paid to Coal India by the State power generating companies. He said that gencos wouldn’t be able to pay unless and until Discoms pay Gencos for the power supplied to them. As per Singh, the dues of all Gencos excluding States owned are ₹75,000 crore.