Economics of Power Generation, Transmission, and Distribution

Power has become an inevitable ingredient in every day human life and a universal input for economic growth. With steadily growing population, increasing urbanization and rapid diversification of the economies, the demand for power has been increasing unprecedentedly the world over. However, most third world economics including India has been suffering from chronic power shortage, leading to frequent power cuts, and load shedding. This in turn has slowed down the tempo of economic activities and caused disruptions to normal life of the people. Any serious study about the problems of power shortage has to attempt an evaluation of the existing power system, and suggest suitable measures for capacity addition, improving the efficiency of generation, transmission distribution and for reforming the tariff structure. All such aspects have been discussed in this book. Performance of ten major hydro power projects of Kerala has been evaluated in this study, in terms of techno-economic parameters like plant load factor, capacity utilization factor, transmission and distribution factors etc. In addition to recommending reforms in the existing tariff structure, the study also touches upon energy options for the state. The demand forecasting models incorporated in this study takes into consideration the sectoral power demand, as different from the conventional models. The forecasting based on this model provides a significantly different picture about the power requirements of Kerala.