A power tech overhaul

IES, an ambitious initiative, aims to integrate producers, distributors, and consumers into a connected data ecosystem for smarter energy management and consumer participation

- SUDHEER PAL SINGH

The power ministry is working with discoms, regulators, and technology companies to roll out the IES blueprint, which will ultimately be implemented nationwide

As with some other critical sectors such as insurance, health care and ecommerce, the government is steaming ahead with a digital initiative that it hopes will restructure the energy sector and streamline its functioning.

The so-called India Energy Stack (IES) has been envisioned as the tech backbone that will allow stakeholders in the power sector to seamlessly exchange data to enable next-generation reforms. More importantly, it will also offer domestic consumers of power unprecedented access to a much wider market in new ways.

These include ease of selling power through solar rooftops to other users in the grid, trading excess power in the open market through aggregators, using real-time intelligence from their smart meters to manage time-of-day usage, and access to modern billing applications.

For power distribution companies, or discoms, the national Utility Intelligence Platform (UIP) — which is set to be commissioned within a year as a pilot under IES — will allow development of data analytics tools for critical interventions, including revenue protection in high loss areas, peer-to-peer energy trading, and outage management, among others.

The power distribution sector has traditionally been seen as the weakest link in the Indian electricity sector because of huge operational inefficiencies of discoms. The ongoing effort to upgrade power supply infrastructure with modern technology assumes significance as the country’s energy demand is growing at the fastest rate among major economies due to its economic expansion.