Flexibility and reliability: the new paradigm in India’s energy transition
The old benchmark was installed capacity. The emerging one is how quickly supply can follow demand.
For decades, the health of a power system was summarised by a single number: installed capacity. It was a reasonable proxy when generation was despatchable and demand followed predictable patterns. Neither condition fully holds in a system where a third of generation is variable and demand is being reshaped by cooling, electrification and data centres.
The replacement benchmark is flexibility — how quickly supply can follow demand, how much variable generation the network can absorb without additional risk, and how reliably delivery holds when the system is stressed.
Stress tests arrive as weather
Heat events make this concrete. India has recorded its longest heatwave on record, with some regions approaching 50 degrees Celsius. Cooling demand under those conditions rises sharply and stays high into the night, which is exactly the profile that solar alone cannot serve and that tests ramping capability across the fleet.
Systems that had built flexibility — storage, demand response, flexible thermal operation — handled it. Systems that had only built capacity discovered the difference between the two.
Designing for the new benchmark
Flexibility is procured, not assumed. That means contracting structures that pay for ramping and availability rather than energy alone, storage specified at the point of generation, and transmission planned as a system-wide asset rather than project by project.
It also means operating existing thermal assets differently — cycling rather than running flat, with the maintenance regimes and commercial terms that mode of operation requires.
Originally published in The Wire. Read the full piece at the source.
More on this theme in Ratul Puri on India's energy transition, or read about his role as Chairman of Hindustan Power.