Content from the Brookings Institution India Center is now archived. After seven years of an impactful partnership, as of September 11, 2020, Brookings India is now the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, an independent public policy institution based in India.
Brookings India organized a Workshop / Discussion examining electricity access and sustainability in Karnataka, bringing together leaders from utilities, government, scholars, industry, and civil society.
The discussions were anchored around a to-be-released Working Paper examining rural and urban supply of electricity, which is now available as a Brookings India Working Paper.
The key recommendations from the workshop were:
1) Enhance transparency in supply, with granularity for citizens (time, location, etc.). If necessary, begin with internal transparency, before moving towards public reporting.
2) Focus on actual supply of electricity to households, more than the wires based definition of “electrification”. Begin collecting data on and then move to a norm for actual supply of power, especially in the 6-10 PM evening peak period.
3) Accelerate feeder separation but combine it with more analysis on its net cost-benefits / viability. Experiment with smart meters as a means of sub-feeder level granularity of “feeder separation”.
4) Improve analytics which requires gathering, storing, and analyzing data with fine granularity. There is already substantial data beinggenerated, but it is not being utilized enough. R-APDRP will produce enormous volumes of more data, but it is not yet used properly.
5) Reduce the share of Irrigation Pumpset (IP) loads on the utilities
6) Reduce technical losses on the system, and not just commercial ones (which should be done anyways). AT&C blends the two, while improvements for the two require different solutions.
7) Examine new accounting and policy innovations to help end load-shedding, now factoring in outage costs, kerosene usage, etc.
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