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Vol. XXV
No. 01
January 07,2001 |
People’s Democracy
Power Sector: A Time Bomb Ticking Away
Prabir Purkayastha
THE priority in the power sector has
been to chase high cost power to meet mythical demands. As Enron has shown, the result of
adding a huge amount of costly power leads to bankrupting the Maharashtra State
Electricity Board (MSEB). When the second stage coming on-stream, MSEB will pay more than
50 per cent of its revenue to Enron for adding only 20 per cent of its installed capacity.
This will not only bankrupt MSEB but also the Maharashtra government.
Unfortunately, failures of earlier
reforms have taught the power establishment nothing. The current proposals of
restructuring the electricity boards, carry with it similar problems. The restructuring of
the State Electricity Boards (SEBs) will lead to revaluing the assets of the Boards and
paying their capital costs all over again. This would obviously impact power tariffs
substantially, a consequence on which everybody is maintaining a studied silence.
Enron is not just a bad contract.
Underlying Enron is a mindset that propagates that power at any cost is preferable to no
power. In the first phase of reforms, this led to getting private projects with very
expensive power. Andhra has shown that power tariffs are not elastic; people will not
tolerate sharp rises in power tariffs without large-scale resistance.
EXPENSIVE ENRON
POWER
Why is Enrons power so expensive?
There are three major reasons for the same. The first is choosing the liquid fuel route
naphtha for the first stage and Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) for the second stage.
Denominating the price of power in dollars compounded this. If the above two were not
enough, MSEB promised a fixed capacity charge: if they did not draw power equal to 82 per
cent, they would pay Enron a sum equal to about Rs 90 crore per month at todays
price of the rupee. All these have contributed to Enron power costing MSEB more than Rs
7.00 per unit.
Enrons argument is that in any
pricing of power, we have to take the pooled cost into account. In any electrical system,
there are new sources of power new power stations and older stations. With
time, the capital costs of the older stations get written off and the costs of their power
become cheaper than the new stations that we put up. Thus, NTPCs old plants such as
Singrauli still supply power at Re 0.77 per unit while its new plants charge about Rs
3.00. Enrons argument is that we should look at the average cost of the power in the
pool and not the individual cost of suppliers such as Enron.
OVER ESTIMATION
OF DEMAND
The scheduling of new power stations is
crucial as if we add new expensive power capacity far above our requirement, we will
increase the pooled costs substantially. The question that is relevant is how short of
power are we and how much do we need in the next decade? If the Ninth Plan documents are
to be believed, we need an additional 100,000 MW in the next decade. The predictions are
based on the 15th Electric Power Survey (EPS). The 15th EPS, like the 14th EPS and the
13th EPS, grossly over-estimated the demand. 15th EPS estimated demand by the year 2000-01
at 90,000 MW against an actual demand of 73,000 MW. For the year 2001-02, 15th
EPS predicted a figure of 95,757 MW as demand against a projected demand based on current
load demand of at best 76,500 MW. The rate of growth of power demand assumed in the 15th
EPS was about 6-7.6 per cent against an actual growth of only 4-5 per cent.
The reason for the repeated
overestimation in the successive power surveys is because the surveys assume that power
demand is autonomous and does not depend on factors such as industrial growth, the health
of the economy and the cost of power. Further, it assumes that the ability of the Indian
power system to meet peak demand (peak to installed capacity) is poor 65 per cent
at best — and considerably lower than even other developing countries such as Bangladesh,
Philippines and Pakistan, all of whom have figures in the range of 75-90 per cent. This
leads to gross overestimation of the amount of installed capacity that we need to add.
If we had indeed added 57,735 MW as
planned in the Ninth Plan, we would have been surplus to the tune of 30,000 MW and 150
Billion Units of energy for which there would have been no demand. Due to this huge
increase in expensive new power source added to the pool, the cost of power would have
increased by 40-50 per cent. Instead, we will add about 19,000 MW in the Ninth
Plan with shortages of 10 per cent in peak demand and 5 per cent in energy demand. If we
had added about 28,000 MW, we would have met peak demand of 76,500 MW even with current
peak to installed capacity ratio. The slippages from the Eighth Plan and CEA cleared
schemes — 28,447 MW — was enough to meet actual demand.
Our shortages are currently of peaking
power. However, our focus still remains base load plants. Adding 28,244 MW of private
power as base load stations, would have further distorted the economics of the power pool.
Base load stations with liquid fuel and rise in liquid fuel prices has further compounded
the problem of the pooled costs.
Thus building overcapacity in the system
has huge costs, costs particularly that the people have to bear in terms of higher
tariffs.
We have earlier addressed the issue
whether Enrons cost of Rs 7.00 per unit compared to the average cost MSEBs own
plants of about Rs 2.00 per unit is fair or not. Here, I will confine myself to the
question of the pool itself. What happens to the pooled costs if the ratio of new power to
older power is high as has happened in Maharashtra? In the Enron case, all of a sudden, a
new expensive source –generating more than 2,000 MW with a minimum guaranteed off-take of
82 per cent — is being dumped into the existing pool. This results in a huge surplus of
generating capacity. As MSEB has given off-take guarantees (in any case LNG contracts are
take-or-pay contracts), they will have to back down their cheaper units. Prayas, a
young group of energy professionals have done a study of MSEBs economics after the
second stage starts to produce full power (scheduled for 2001 end). Their calculations
show that the average tariff for domestic and agricultural consumers must rise from Rs
1.45 currently to Rs 3.60: a more than two fold rise in their tariffs, if MSEB has to
survive! They have also calculated that if Enron had been scheduled for 2003, when
there would have been adequate demand, the impact on the tariffs would have been much
less. The Enron case is not only one of very expensive power but how such power should
be scheduled in the pool.
CURRENT REFORMS
Now let us look at the current set of
reforms that the ministry is proposing. The ministry and planning agencies are focussing
on restructuring the State Electricity Boards (SEBs) by separating generation,
transmission and distribution into separate businesses and then privatising them. Setting
up a regulatory framework will — according to the government and its experts
depoliticise electricity tariffs allowing the subsidies in agriculture to be reduced, if
not removed completely.
While it is clear that agricultural
tariff will rise after restructuring, the domestic consumer does not believe that
restructuring and privatisation will affect his or her tariffs. What the current
reformers are not telling the people, is that privatisation of existing assets of the SEBs
will lead to its revaluation. Unless we agree to handing over all SEBs to private
parties at book value virtually then gifting them away we will have to get
them valued at either replacement costs or at market value. Once this is done and these
assets handed over to private capital at those prices, the historical low cost of power of
older stations will get revalued with current capital costs, leading to a much higher
price of pooled power. For instance, the hydel stations in Orissa were supplying power at
the historical cost of 10 paise. After restructuring, the cost of such power is now 40
paise. The impact thus of restructuring is to substantially increase the cost of pooled
power. After restructuring MSEB, for example, high cost power of Enron will not be pooled
with low cost of existing power in the pool, but with an already high cost of pooled
power.
There is certainly a need to improve the
electricity sector in the country. I am afraid that instead of taking hard decisions and
concrete steps to improve the sector, we are substituting real reforms with slogans. The
political system has to realise that the power sector is a time bomb ticking away at its
heart. And only concerted action in a positive direction will save the power sector and
the country.
