Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
More Power to India : The Challenge of Electricity DistributionThis report assesses progress in implementing the government of India's power sector reform agenda and examines the performance of the sector along different dimensions. India has emphasized that an efficient, resilient, and financially robust power sector is essential for growth and poverty reduction. Almost all investment-climate surveys point to poor availability and quality of power as critical constraints to commercial and manufacturing activity and national competitiveness. Further, more than 300 million Indians live without electricity, and those with power must cope with unreliable supply, pointing to huge unsatisfied demand and restricted consumer welfare. This report reviews the evolution of the Indian power sector since the landmark Electricity Act of 2003, with a focus on distribution as key to the performance and viability of the sector. While all three segments of the power sector (generation, transmission, and distribution) are important, revenues originate with the customer at distribution, so subpar performance there hurts the entire value chain. Persistent operational and financial shortcomings in distribution have repeatedly led to central bailouts for the whole sector, even though power is a concurrent subject under the Indian constitution and distribution is almost entirely under state control. Ominously, the recent sharp increase in private investment and market borrowing means power sector difficulties are more likely to spill over to lenders and affect the broader financial sector. Government-initiated reform efforts first focused on the generation and transmission segments, reflecting the urgent need for adding capacity and evacuating it and the complexity of issues to be addressed at the consumer interface. Consequently, distribution improvements have lagged, but it is now clear that they need to be a priority. This report thus analyzes the multiple sources of weakness in distribution and identifies the key challenges to improving performance in the short and medium term. The report is aimed at policy makers and government officials, academics, and civil society in the fields of energy, governance, and infrastructure economics and finance, as well as private investors and lenders in the energy arena.
-
Beyond Crisis : The Financial Performance of India's Power SectorAt the end of 2011, the Indian power
 sector found itself in financial crisis, just a decade after
 the 2001 bailout of state electricity boards (SEBs) by the
 central government. Bankrupt state power distribution
 utilities in several states were unable to pay their bills
 or repay their debts. Despite the passage of the landmark
 2003 Electricity Act and implementation of a broad set of
 reforms over the past decade, the sector today is looking at
 another rescue from the center, four times larger than
 before. This financial rescue scheme amounts to about Rs 1.9
 trillion ($42 billion) and was instigated by the
 nonperforming assets of the banks and other financial
 institutions. The Electricity Act was envisaged to create
 independent companies functioning on commercial principles,
 but they are still far away from that goal. This report
 presents a diagnostic of the financial and operational
 performance of segments in the power sector value chain
 between adoption of the Electricity Act, 2003, and 2011,
 including analysis of the factors that contributed to the
 recent crisis. The report focuses on efficiency and
 productivity, whether performance has improved over time,
 and which states have emerged as performance leaders.
 Analysis of this kind is not new or unique, but this report
 aims to integrate historical performance, the current
 situation, future projections of the impact of worsening
 sector finances, and the actions that need to be taken to
 check the downturn. The report draws primarily from utility
 data collected by the Power Finance Corporation in
 successive years on utilities operational and financial
 performance. The Power Finance Corporation data were
 collated into a single database with the addition of various
 operational parameters at the plant level and the utility
 level from the Central Electricity Authority.
-
International Experience with Cross-border Power TradingThe five main lessons for Southern Africa from our review of the experiencewith cross-border power trading in other regions of the work are that: Security of supply concerns need to be explicitly addressed and understood by the parties to proposed cross-border transactions. Regional entities need to be empowered to make decisions based on legally enforceable national government commitments, particularly in relation to planning, pricing, and settlement rules. Bilateral trading provides a basis for expanding trading volumes, both through constructing the physical infrastructure that future deals will use and by establishing workable legal and regulatory frameworks. Power pools will help to generate sustained increases in cross-border trading along with other regional trading arrangements, particularly in power systems with several interconnection. The substance and process of regulatory reviews in importing and exporting countries must be clear to create sufficient investment certainty.