Flexibility Operation of Hydro Power Station: A Case Study on 9PM9Minutes Event on 5th April 2020

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Flexibility Operation of Hydro Power Station: A Case Study on 9PM9Minutes Event on 5th April 2020

Mishra, Surendra Kumar / Pani, Jaganath

Hydropower can play a crucial role in India’s sustainable development and energy security as it meets the criteria of sustainability, availability and reliability. Hydropower by virtue of its inherent characteristics has gained importance with large scale RE integration and the flexibility it provides has made it amongst best suited to match the rate of variability of RE. Hydro flexibility was successfully tested during the recent 9PM9M event on 5th April 2020. Though the drop in loads was anticipated up to 15 GW but in actual it plunged by 31 GW, nevertheless, it didn’t turn out to be difficult task to maintain grid stability given the robust infrastructure, planning and sizeable Hydropower and Gas based generation capacity which had come to the rescue. Hydro generation played vital role in balancing the grid and provided the much more than the envisaged flexibility and ramping rate. The event significantly assessed and marked flexibility in the grid and its manageability. Going forward, the results of the event has provided advocacy of the need of hydropower in the Indian grid as one of the best suited energy sources to meet the variability of increasing RE generation. The paper presents the experience during the event on the flexible operations of hydropower stations with focus on NHPC power stations and its contribution in grid stability and security and future ready.