By Manish Gupta
The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) on Wednesday notified the National Electricity Plan (NEP) for 2022-32 with a planned investment of Rs 33,60,594 crore and aimed at raising the share of non-fossil fuel capacity to nearly 70%.
“The share of non-fossil based capacity is expected to increase from around 42.5% at present to 57.4% by the end of 2026-27 and further to 68.4% by the end of 2031-32,” the ministry of power said in a statement.
As per the NEP document, the projected all-India peak electricity demand is 277.2 GW for 2026-27 and 366.4 GW for 2031-32.
“The total fund requirement for generation capacity addition for the period 2022-2027 is estimated to be Rs 14,54,188 crore and for the period 2027-2032 has been estimated to be Rs 19,06,406 crore,” the ministry said.
The likely installed capacity for 2026-27 is 609,591 MW, comprising of 273,038 MW of conventional and 336,553 MW of renewable based capacity. For 2031-32, it is estimated to be 900,422 MW, comprising of 304,147 MW of conventional and 596,275 MW of renewable-based capacity.
“The projection of total capacity addition is in line with the target of the country to achieve a non-fossil based installed capacity of around 500 GW by the year 2029-30,” the ministry said.
The average emission factor is expected to reduce to 0.548 kg CO2/kWh net during 2026-27 and to 0.430 kg CO2/kWh net by the end of 2031-32. The average PLF of the total installed coal capacity of 235.1 GW is likely to be about 58.4% in 2026-27 and that of 259.6 GW of coal-based capacity is likely to be about 58.7% in 2031-32.
As per the NEP projections, the energy storage capacity of 16.13 GW/82.37 GWh with PSP-based storage of 7.45GW capacity and 47.65 GWh storage and BESS-based storage of 8.68 GW/ 34.72 GWh is required by 2026-27.
The storage capacity requirement increases to 73.93 GW (26.69 GW PSP and 47.24 GW BESS) with storage of 411.4 GWh (175.18 GWh from PSP and 236.22 GWh from BESS) by 2031-32. The domestic coal requirement has been estimated to be 866.4 million tonne for 2026-27 and 1,025.8 MT for 2031-32, and estimated requirement of 28.9 MT of coal imports for the plants designed to run on imported coal.