India Renewables Dashboard Launched, To Offer Generation Data On Renewables

In a move that needs to be widely welcomed, the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) and CEEW’s Centre for Energy Finance (CEEW-CEF) have launched the India Renewables Dashboard yesterday. The dashboard will provide detailed operational information on renewable energy (RE) projects in India. The move, if executed ell, will be a welcome addition to the quality of data on renewable energy in India, which has tended to be capacity led and limited, rather than actual generation. For the lay reader,  it is always a surprise to know that despite a renewable base that is close to 25 percent of total generation capacity, actual generation of renewables is much lower. Especially for Wind and Solar. The new dashboard should be able to clear out misinformation and doubts on that front.

The information is planned to be available to all. From plant level data, to info on generation at local, state, and national level, all the data will be made available on this dashboard for renewable projects in the country.

Sandesh Kumar Sharma, member (planning) of CEA inaugurated the same.

The exercise to have the national dashboard has also been supported by the Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation.

Previously, such data required manual aggregation and was not easily accessible. The India Renewables Dashboard addresses this challenge by automating the process of updating daily RE generation.

Currently, the India Renewables Dashboard shows India’s solar power generation on April 21 at 190.4 million units even as wind power generation came in at 110.7 million units. This represented a combined 8.3 per cent share for the two sources in total electricity generation on that day. Solar generation’s biggest day remains April 1, when 216.5 million units were generated, while the all time high for wind generation is 444.5 million units, on August 12, 2020, or the middle of the monsoons.

As the data collection improves and matures, we are hopeful that the quality of discourse on renewable energy, as well as the planning for the future, will be positively impacted by this database.