Wind power caters to a third of Tamil Nadu’s electricity supply

Daily wind power alone caters to around a third of the total power consumption in Tamil Nadu. According to data released by Tantransco, nearly 120 million units out of the total consumption of 316 million units comes from wind power generation.

Wind power is the largest among all sources of power supply in Tamil Nadu. The current year has seen an impressive rise in daily wind power –in the past 15 days, a three-fold rise in wind power evacuation was recorded.

“Another high in wind energy absorption of 120.25 MU was seen on July 9. This is an all-time high in Tamil Nadu and may be across the country. No state would have generated and absorbed so much wind power in a day,” said Tangedco chairman Rajesh Lakhoni.

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“Tangedco evacuated 5,689 MW of wind power at 5.02 pm on July 4, higher than the previous peak evacuation of 5,535 MW on June 30. This was possible only because of meticulous planning in grid management by the State Load Dispatch Centre (SLDC),” said Lakhoni.

“If wind power is available, the state government has instructed us to completely use it and therefore we are keeping most of our thermal units on standby,” said a senior SLDC official.

On an average less than 70 million units of thermal units are being used to provide power supply. “Wind power supply is the maximum among all other sources of power. Wind power is followed by central thermal and nuclear units which provide around 98 million units on an average,” said the official.

With forecasts for rain in many districts, the power demand is less compared to last month. “The peak demand in the evening is less than 16,000 MW. Of this, nearly 5,000 MW is from the wind power alone. Solar contributes around 600MW mostly in the morning,” said the official.

Since the start of this year’s wind power session, Tamil Nadu has been evacuating more wind power. As per data released by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), Tangedco in May had used 2,108.47 million units of wind power against 1507.05 MU in May 2021 and 1128.60 MU in May 2020.

Generally wind power season starts around May 15, but this year wind power generation began by the first week of May. “Wind power season began in the first week of May but it was not continuous and we had to depend on coal to meet the summer power demand. But after May 10, we started to get wind power continuously,” said the official.