Vidyut PRAVAH
The government has launched Vidyut PRAVAH- Electricity, Price Availability and Highlights mobile application.
- The app is aimed at empowering common people to demand 24X7 power from the states and is expected to take transparency to the next level and make state governments more accountable.
- The mobile application provides highlights of the power availability in India on real time basis
What challenges exist if government wants to provide 24×7 power to all households in the country? Critically examine. (200 Words)
The following are the challenges faced :
- Vast number of connections to be made and large demand : 80 million households need to be connected and the remaining 250 million households connected need proper uninterrupted supply of electricity.
- Large dependence on coal (non-renewable source): To provide for the increased demand a large amount of coal is required and so large amounts of coal reserve needs to be exploited. Moreover India does not have reserves of anthracite variety coal so needs to import it for more efficient production of electricity.
- Low renewable energy setups: The current requirement is 100GW from solar energy and 60 GW from wind energy. There are limited renewable energy setups so a high initial investment is required to set up such plants.
- High transmission & distribution losses: High T&D losses exist , which hasn’t been reduced due to lack of technology up gradation and investment. These losses has to be curtailed to increase the availability of electricity.
- Non- viability of electricity boards: Most of the state electricity boards have become non-viable due to energy thefts, misuse of electricity subsidy given for agriculture use and lack of cost linked tariffs. Due to government interference the state boards are unable to increase tariffs with the increase in cost of production.
- Lack of capacity of Coal India to match up to the demands of the industry. The recent captive power plant coal auction allowing limited private participation is an improvement in this direction. But direct mining by commercial coal miners can help in bringing competence, investment and technology to the sector.
- Lack of rail connectivity to pithead
- Lack of speedy environmental and forest clearances
- Renewable energy sector: even though national clean energy fund has been increased to 200 per tonne, no fund under this has been disbursed.
Hence, it is important for the government to overcome the challenges otherwise 24X7 power supply to all households by 2019 will remain a distant dream