India confident of meeting summer power demand despite Middle East gas shock

By Sethuraman N R

NEW DELHI, March 21 (Reuters) - India does not expect the Middle East crisis to affect its ability to meet soaring power demand this summer, as the country has lined up coal and renewable capacity to make up for any gas supply issues, a senior government official said on Saturday.

Although gas accounts for only around 2% of India's total power generation, the South Asian country uses about 8 gigawatts (GW) of gas power during peak-demand periods or heat waves.

"We are quite hopeful that this (Middle East) crisis is not going to impact us in terms of meeting demand," India's Power Secretary Pankaj Agarwal told Reuters on the sidelines of a power industry event.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has hit gas supplies, forcing suppliers to declare force majeure notices to customers and leaving India, the world's second-largest liquefied petroleum gas importer, facing its worst cooking gas crisis in decades as shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have been almost halted.

India is expecting a 4 GW coal power plant in the western state of Gujarat to be restarted and additionally has a lot of wind energy projects on the verge of supplying electricity to the grid, Agarwal said.

There is enough solar power available to meet the peak day time power demand of 270 GW and the government is also working on speeding up completion of battery energy storage projects to meet evening demand, he added.

"About 2.5 gigawatt hours of battery storage is already under commissioning, and we hope that gets commissioned very fast," Agarwal said.

Meanwhile, India has produced 1 billion metric tons of coal for a second successive year, the coal ministry said on Saturday, which could be enough to meet summer power demand.

India has asked its domestic coal-based utilities to be prepared for supplying uninterrupted power in the absence of gas supplies, Reuters reported earlier this month.