The ongoing power crisis in Keralam draws striking parallels to the 1980s, a time when unexpected load-shedding and wild voltage fluctuations were part of daily life. It is not much different now. With rainfall scarce and demand surging, the state is grappling with a severe power shortage and unannounced outages. One might jest that the situation aligns with the recent social media trend of turning the clock back to the 1980s, but the people’s pain is real and the joke is on the Kerala State Electricity Board and successive governments that have done precious little to enhance capacity to cope with growing demand. Over the last three decades, Keralam has not seen any significant addition to its generation capacity, with the last big project commissioned in 1997. Some smaller projects have come up, but not enough to meet the rising demand. To power itself, Keralam has made a habit of plugging into other states’ capacities and the national grid.
The state’s daily peak power demand—which crossed 6,000 megawatts earlier this year—averages at about 4,800 MW. The availability, on the other hand, is only around 4,200 MW. The gap forces the state to ‘beg, borrow or steal’. While it looks to beg and borrow from other states on a daily basis, the power utility also has indulged in unauthorised overdrawing from the national grid, risking penalties. The irony is that Keralam has an installed solar capacity of nearly 2,500 MW, but the supply is erratic. Demand peaks in the night and the state lacks the infrastructure to store solar power.
The sight needs to be fixed on long-term solutions beyond the ongoing political blame-game. Growth in power consumption is a natural fallout of urbanisation and economic advancement. Hence, the solution lies in raising supply rather than regulating demand. Since new projects are likely to face environmental and societal hurdles, Keralam must speed up plans for pumped storage generation at the existing hydel plants. It can also go for large-scale battery storage systems to make efficient use of its renewable capacity.
Back in the 1980s, people put up with outages because they did not know any better. But a modern society demands uninterrupted supply. Going back to 1980s is not an option for the people, neither is it for the government.