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Informist, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026

 

AHMEDABAD - The key structural risk confronting India's power sector currently is not the addition of generation capacity but the system's ability to build infrastructure that would help transmit the unprecedented scale of additions underway, Ghanshyam Prasad, chairperson of the Central Electricity Authority, said Thursday.

 

Speaking at the inaugural event of the Fourth India Energy Transition Summit in New Delhi, Prasad talked of this shift in the sector's core challenge — from building capacity to managing integration. "The mismatch is visible in renewable-heavy states such as Rajasthan and Gujarat, where curtailment has occurred due to transmission constraints and timing gaps between generation commissioning and grid evacuation infrastructure," Prasad said. The Central Electricity Authority chairperson said that last year, Rajasthan had seen nearly 8 gigawatts of renewable capacity not being utilised due to lack of transmission connectivity. This has now come down to 3 GW, he added.

 

Prasad said India added around 52 GW of capacity in the first 10 months of this financial year, with 10-15 GW likely to be added in the coming two months. He said India would add similar levels of renewable power capacity over the next two to three years. With India targeting 500 GW of non-fossil capacity by 2030 and potentially four times the current capacity by 2047, sequencing the generation and transmission would be critical, he said.

 

While acknowledging the mismatch in the transmission and generation infrastructure, the electricity body's chief also cautioned against overbuilding generation capacity. "You have to be very careful because we have already burned our fingers between 2011 and 2016, if I am not mistaken, wherein we had to suffer around 40,000 megawatts of coal-based capacity getting stressed and stranded, and it took us around 8 to 9 years to get them on track," Prasad added.

 

Prasad also flagged the emerging demand from data centres, and green hydrogen and electric vehicles, which require higher reliability standards and dual-source supply architectures, complicating traditional planning models.

 

The next phase of India's energy transition, Prasad said, will hinge less on capacity targets and more on synchronised planning across generation, storage, transmission, and markets.  End

 

Reported by Sunil Raghu

Edited by Tanima Banerjee

 

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