BESCOM: Adoption of best practices and energy demand forecasting

Abstract

Power is an essential requirement for all facets of our life and has been recognized as a basic human need. The socio-economic development of the country depends on power. The economic growth and its global competitiveness rest on the availability of reliable and quality power at competitive rates. The huge and steadily growing demand of power in India makes it one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure. India is world's 6th largest energy consumer, accounting for 3.4% of global energy consumption. Due to India's economic rise, the demand for energy has grown at an average of 3.6% per annum over the past 30 years. In March 2009, the installed power generation capacity of India stood at 147,000 MW while the per capita power consumption stood at 612 kWH. The transmission and distribution losses remain abysmally high, being over 40% in some states. A significant proportion of this loss is non-technical, resulting primarily due to theft of electricity. This is further worsened by the poor payment record of customers, resulting in low collection efficiency in many states. This leads to cash flow problems for utilities resulting in delayed payments for purchased power, coal, and rail transportation As per the Indian Constitution, the power sector is a concurrent subject and is the joint responsibility of the State and Central Governments. The power sector in India has been dominated by the government. The State and Central Government sectors account for 58% and 32% of the generation capacity respectively while the private sector accounts for about 10%1. Most of the transmission and distribution responsibilities rest with the state utilities. In the present study paper we will be mainly focusing on best practices which can be adopted by BESCOM (Bangalore Electricity Supply Company) and forecasting methods and parameters for forecasting used during electric power survey of India.