Indian Uranium Imports

A report in FE with some details of the fuel requirements for Indian reactors.

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/as-thermal-sets-idle-kazakh-russian-uranium-imports-perk-up-india-nuke-power/1278581

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In quantitative terms, in the last four years, India received a total of 2,215 tonnes of uranium from Kazakhstan and Russia, including a shipment of 118 tonnes from Russia this fiscal. Till March 2011, the country had received 868 tonnes of uranium from France, Russia and Kazakhstan, comprising 300 tonnes of natural uranium concentrate from Areva, 58 tonnes as enriched uranium dioxide pellets from Areva, 210 tonnes as natural uranium oxide pellets from Russia’s TVEL and 300 tonnes as natural uranium from Kazatomprom.
The Department of Atomic Energy reckons the annual fuel requirement for operating the indigenous pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWRs) at 85 per cent capacity is about 45 tonnes of uranium dioxide for the older 220 MWe units, 100 tonnes for the 540 MWe units and 125 tonnes for the new 700 MWe units.
By contrast, the requirement of low enriched uranium for operating the imported light water reactors (LWRs) at 85 per cent capacity factor are 6 tonnes for the older 160 MWe Tarapur units and 27 tonnes for 1,000 MWe units such as the Russian-built units at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu.

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Two units at Narora will come under IAEA safeguards this year. One reactor, RAPS 1 at Rawatbhata, Rajasthan (100 MWe), is under extended shutdown for techno-economic assessment.

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Role of Nuclear Energy in the Southern Grid

The nuclear power sites connected to the southern grid of India are the following. Currently all the sites are operated by NPCIL.

1. Madras APS, Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu (2 x 220 MW CANDU derivative PHWRs)
2. Kaiga APS, Karnataka (4 x 220 MW CANDU derivative PHWRs)
3. Kudankulam Unit-I, Ramil Nadu (1 x 1000 MW VVER-1000 LWR)

The total capacity provided by the 3 sites are about 2320 MW - just about 5% of the installed capacity of the southern grid.

In the near future, the following  power plants are expected to come online - expected by the end of CY 2015.

1. Kudankulam Unit-2 (1 x 1000 MW VVER-100  LWR)
2. Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) (1 x 500MW ) to be operated by BHAVINI

These will take the nuclear energy capacity to 3820 MW.

In the long term two more reactors based on the 700 MW PHWR design are planned [ref-1] for Kaiga 5 and 6. Also, if the Kovvada (AP, 3000 MW initial capacity) power station comes up it will also be connected to the southern grid. There is also the additional possibility of at two other 500 MW FBR coming up at Kalpakkam [ref-2]. These will bring the nuclear energy capacity to 9220 MW, hopefully by the middle of the next decade.

References:
[1] http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/india-s-nuclear-capacity-to-be-increased-to-17-080-mw-by-2022-114072201050_1.html
[2] http://www.thehindu.com/2005/09/07/stories/2005090704781300.htm

Case Study: Electricity Generation and Transmission in Tamil Nadu

The generation and distribution of electricity in Tamil Nadu is the responsibility of the state owned company TNEB Ltd. There are two special purpose subsidiaries of TNEB - TANGEDCO and TANTRANSCO, responsible for generation and transmission respectively. Compared to other big states in India, Tamil Nadu is relatively well governed and there is a broad based acceptance across the political spectrum that predictable availability of  electricity is pivotal to the industrial development of the state. This lead to sustained investments in generation and transmission over the past several years and the results are now starting to show.

Several large investments in transmission such as the Green Corridor is in the pipeline along with new capacities coming online in the next few years. So there is a hope that the state's economy is at the threshold of an acceleration of growth led by industry due to predictable availability of electricity - especially to industrial consumers. The recent official announcement of withdrawal of power cuts to industrial users from June 2014 is a step in the right direction.

Granular grid data for Tamil Nadu is available from SRLDC from March 2006 onwards. We will be using this data for the charts in this article.

Power and Energy Trends

The following chart plots the daily energy usage (MU, green line, right axis), and two measures of peak power demand (MW, constant time at 19:00 hrs - blue line, and day peak - red line).

Tamil Nadu: Peak Power and Supplied Energy 2006 - 2014 (Click for a larger version)

It can be observed that the electricity usage, which had been relatively stagnant up to 2012, has started to pick up observably starting from the latter part of 2013 as new capacities started coming online - such as new units at North Chennai TPS and Kudankulam APS. The peak power delivered had recently crossed 13,000 MW for several days and I am sure it would become the norm soon. Similarly energy usage is sustained over 250 MU/day.

The following chart, which plots the energy usage year-over-year allows us to better appreciate the quantum jump in energy delivery made in 2014 over previous years.

Tamil Nadu: Yearly Energy Usage 2006-2014 (Click for a larger version)

As we can see, the 2014 trend is substantially over the previous years trends till date. Keep the following points in mind when reading the chart:

• The periodic variations are due to weekend drop in demand.
• The big drop in January visible in every year is presumably due to the Pongal festival holidays, when heavy industry is generally shut down.

Energy Sources

In the present scenario, the most important energy source of Tamil Nadu is local thermal power plants, which generate about 70-80 MUs every day and the same amount is drawn daily from the central allocation. Less than 20 MUs are produced by local hydroelectric installations. Although, on water surplus years this can exceed 40 MUs. Gas, Naphtha and Diesel power plants have installed capacity to generate around 50 MUs per day, but ends up generating only about half of it. Wind power has installed capacity of greater than 7000 MW, but generates only about 60-70 MUs per day during wind season - about half of the installed capacity. This is presumably due to the evacuation bottlenecks due to suboptimal transmission network. The Green Corridor investments should alleviate some of these concerns. 'Others' - presumably small producers, solar etc. produce about 30 MUs - not an insignificant amount.

Plotting all of this over years as an area chart gives us this:

Tamil Nadu; Energy Sources Data 2006-2014 (Click for a larger version)

Please note the following while interpreting the chart:

• Wind energy was categorized under 'others' until around May 2010. That is the reason there is no wind energy plot before 2010 May.
• The seasonality of wind energy and unreliability of hydro power can be easily observed
• The Gas/Naphtha/Diesel plants are apparently used mostly to balance the grid in the absence of other cheap sources of energy such as wind

Per Capita Electricity Usage of Tamil Nadu

Per capita electrical energy usage is a very useful development indicator. For Tamil Nadu, the data is as follows:

It is notable that the per-capita electricity consumption for Tamil Nadu is at around 3.52 so far for the calendar year of 2014. This is much better than the average for India (2.02) [6], but have a log way to go to reach the level of China (7.04). But the trend, as they say, is your friend.  Except for the dip in 2012 (drought year), the trend is averaging around 5% per year, which is encouraging and I hope this would accelerate in the coming years.

References:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Nadu_Electricity_Board (TNEB Ltd.)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Nadu_Transmission_Corporation_Limited (TANTRANSCO: Tamil Nadu Transmission Corporation)
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Nadu_Generation_and_Distribution_Corporation_Limited (TANGEDCO: Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation)
[4] http://srldc.org/ (SRLDC) : Grid Data
[5] http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/PPT_2.html (Census of India 2011) : Population data for calculating per-capita electricity consumption
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_consumption (Country wise per-capita electricity consumption data)

Transmission Grids: A Tale of Five Regions of India

There are five regional electricity transmission grids in India -  Northern, North Eastern, Eastern, Southern and the Western grids. They are all interconnected and act as a single national grid as of mid 2014, but administered individually by the regional load dispatch centers. Some of these interconnections, such as between western and southern grids now, are more theoretical than practical and energy transmission bottlenecks exist. In this article we intend to analyze the energy supplied by each of these grids. For the time being, we will limit the discussion to the energy and not the power (peak power or otherwise) the grids can handle.

First of all, a review of the regional coverage of each of the grids.

Grid	States Covered	Total Population (2011)
Northern	Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Chandigarh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, NCT of Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh	368,589,914
Western	Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Daman & Diu, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Maharashtra, Goa	272,937,848
Southern	Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Telangana	252,567,336
Eastern	Bihar, Sikkim, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa	270,673,657
North-Eastern	Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya, Assam	44,980,294
Independent	Lakshadweep, Andaman & Nicobar	416,802
	Total	1,210,165,851

By population, the northern grid serves the most citizens (369 million) and the north-eastern grid serves the least (44 million). The other three grids serve approximately the same fraction of the population (272, 270 and 252 million).

Here is a plot of the energy consumption on the five regional grids over the last two years for which common granular data is available.

India: All Regional Grids Energy Usage Trend (Click for a larger Version)

Looking at the plot some disparities clearly stand out. One would have expected, assuming everything else remaining the same, the energy supplied by the grids to reflect the population. But interestingly, the northern grid, despite catering to greater than 30% more people than either the southern or western grids, is not substantially bigger than either of those. The eastern grid serves approximately the same number of people as the western grid, but the energy distributed is substantially lesser. So it is clear that the northern and eastern grids are clearly under-delivering energy to the population they are expected to serve. At the same time, western and southern grids indicate the industrial activities. We have a discussion on population adjusted grid data soon, where we can have represent the north-eastern grid as well, which does not show up in the chart that well, because of the absolute energy served by the grid is smaller compared to the rest.

It is wise to note that we know that a lot more factors than total population affects per-capita electricity consumption, such as population density, prevailing weather etc., as can be seen in the per capita electricity use table for U.S.. But here we are comparing large regions, some bigger than by population than the the U.S., not individual states. So ideally the variations specific to individual states must be smoothed out in the region-wise data.

Taking into account well known facts about India's skewed development, where development and better governance is concentrated in the southern and the western states, this disparity can easily be explained. The grid data, is therefore a good hard-data proxy for the progress in the development of each of the regions. In our future articles, we will study individual states and evaluate the trends in their progress using the electricity consumption as a coincident indicator.

Other Observations

• The northern grid seems to have a well prominent and amplified (200-300 MU, 20-30% of generation) regional variation. This is due to the summer air-conditioning demand and the agricultural demand for operating groundwater pumps for the water-intensive summer paddy crop.
• The western grid also have a seasonal variation, but not as prominent as the northern grid. This seems to coincide with the onset of monsoon, which may indicate reduction in cooling demand.
• The southern grid seems to have peaks at around March, which needs more study.
• The eastern grid is not indicating much year over year growth that the other grids are showing, indicating a stagnant consumption scenario. We wonder if we adjust for population growth, there is any growth in per capita consumption in the eastern region at all.

Benefits of a National Grid?

As we have noted above, there are prominent regional seasonal variations in the electricity consumption pattern and some of these patterns cancel each other - for example the latter part of the northern grid peak coincides with the trough of the western grid consumption. If we have a truly interconnected national grid without bottlenecks, the consumption peaks can be easily managed by managing appropriate distribution of peaking consumers to idling producers.

The following chart sums up the electricity usages for all grids.

India: All Regional Grids Energy Usage Trend with Total (Click for a larger Version)

As can be seen, the variations in the total energy demand is much smaller as a percentage compared to say, the variations in the northern grid.

References:
[1] http://censusindia.gov.in/ (2011 Population Data)
[2] http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/us_per_capita_electricity-2010.html (U.S. Per Capita Electricity Use By State)
[3] http://www.srldc.org/ ; http://wrldc.com/ ; http://nrldc.in/ ; http://www.erldc.org/ ; http://www.nerldc.org/ (Grid Utilization Data)

Contribution of Renewable Energy to India's Southern Grid

There is publicly available data on the daily contribution of renewable energy to the southern grid from May 11, 2010. Almost all of the renewable energy contribution into the southern grid come from hydroelectric and wind generation. We are aware of some grid connected solar energy projects coming online, but the capacity is too tiny right now to consider and moreover SRLDC does not report solar generation separately for us to track easily.

If we plot the renewable energy generation against the total energy generation generation we get the following chart (Data from May 11, 2010 to July 12 2014).

Southern Grid: Contribution of Renewable Energy (Click for a larger version)

The light blue series is the percentage contribution of  renewable energy to the total energy generation. It is plotted against the secondary (right) axis.

The records for each of the series from the chart are:

• Maximum hydro generation - 201.99 GWh on Aug 8, 2013
• Maximum wind generation - 125.13 GWh on Jun 25, 2014
• Maximum total renewable generation - 274.63 GWh on Aug 8, 2013
• Maximum % of renewable generation - 38.5 % on Aug 7, 2013

It can be seen that there were instances in the monsoon season of 2011 and 2013 where renewable energy generation touched more than 30% the grid energy generation. Maximum renewable generation happens typically during the monsoon season of south India because it coincides with both the wind season and the rainy season when reservoirs typically are getting full and local electricity boards maximizes the generation of cheap hydroelectric power rather than let reservoirs reach max capacity. This  copious hydro power generation can be seen as peaks in the red line. This is not seen in 2012 - the red line representing hydro power generation stays low (in fact dips) during the monsoon months. The reason for this was that 2011 and 2013 were above average monsoons with +2% and +6% departures from normal while the monsoon of 2012 was a below average monsoon with -7% departure from normal.

This can be seen in the following rainfall maps from IMD.

Rainfall map for the monsoon of 2011

Rainfall map for the monsoon of 2012

Rainfall map for the monsoon of 2013

So far this year (2014) the monsoons had been deficient, but the rains during the last two weeks give a glimmer of hope for the currently dire hydro power situation in southern India. We will revisit this subject at the end of 2014 monsoon season later this year.

Sources:
[1] Generation Data : http://srldc.org/
[2] Rainfall Maps : IMD
      - 2011 - http://www.imd.gov.in/section/nhac/dynamic/mon2011.jpg
      - 2012 - http://www.imd.gov.in/section/nhac/dynamic/mon2012.jpg
      - 2013 - http://www.imd.gov.in/section/hydro/dynamic/rfmaps/seasonal/mon2013.jpg

BusinessLine Report on the Challenges of Utilizing the Full Potential of Wind Power in TN

There was an excellent article published in BusinessLine dated June 23rd, 2014 on the challenges faced by the grid managers in Tamil Nadu in accommodating the whole of the energy generated by wind power producers.

Inquiring minds may wish to read the article in full.

Handling wind power: TN faces many a challenge

Some important quotes:

Even now, 4-5 hours of wind power generation is not being taken, despite there being sufficient transmission infrastructure, says PP Gupta, Managing Director of Techno Electric, whose subsidiary, Simran Wind Project, owns 190 MW of capacity in the state.

You can handle infirm wind if you have sufficient ‘peaking capacity’, or power plants that can very quickly ramp up generation when required. Fortunately, Tamil Nadu has four such power plants – Basin Bridge (196 MW), Samalpatti (100 MW), Madurai Power (100 MW) and Pillaiperumal Nallur (330 MW).

These capacities can quickly come online. For instance, the GMR-owned Basin Bridge power plant can ramp up from zero to 20 MW at the rate of 2 MW a minute, and from 20 MW to 50 MW at one MW a minute. 

 Finally the article concludes with:

In the absence of peaking capacities, the wind power capacity in the state will continue to be under utilised, experts note.

Our previous post on wind energy must be read in the context of this report - that the wind energy generation capacity in TN is persistently underutilized because of grid management concerns .

Southern Grid: Wind Energy

The SRLDC daily reports started publishing daily wind energy generation as an entry separate from 'Others' starting from May-10, 2010. So now we have over 4 years of data of wind energy generation of the southern grid, which should be sufficient to show us the relevant trends. This is a very important data point because the southern grid connects to a large part (around 10GW)[2] of the grid connected wind farms in India.

Wind energy generation in south India follows a very clear seasonal pattern. There are quiet months (November to April) and busy months (May to October). During the lean months typical generation is less than 20 MUs per day and during the windy months the daily generation can exceed 100 MUs with the existing installed capacity.

This is the plot of the data as-is - from May-10, 2010 to July-10, 2014 :

Southern Grid: Wind Energy Generation 2010-2014
(click for a larger version)

The day to day generation data can be quite noisy and can be difficult to track and to observe trends. I prefer the 7-day moving average to smooth out the short term variations.

Southern Grid: Wind Energy Generation 2010-2014 7-day moving average
(click for a larger version)

It can be seen that the energy generation has increased substantially from the 2010 base. Generation for the years 2013 and 2014 had been approximately the same although 2014 had seen new daily energy generation records in excess of 120 MUs. Although there had been substantial recent efforts in Tamil Nadu at improving the grid infrastructure to improve the capacity to evacuate wind energy, more investment and effort seems to be needed to bring about observable difference. The installed capacity for 2013 and 2014 remain almost the same. The substantial improvements in 2011, 2012 were most likely due to new capacities coming online, although the evacuation infrastructure remained constrained.

Now we are almost half way through the wind season of 2014. So the grid improvements coming online later this year could probably only be seen only during the 2015 wind season.

Sources:
[1] Data: http://srldc.org/
[2] Wind Power in India (Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_India