SURE Y3 Annual Report

Launched in 2019, the program aims to help national and state partners develop an enabling environment for faster and more cost-effective deployment of renewable energy. PACE-D 2.0 RE worked with the Government of Assam to develop tools and methods that can help the state distribution utility, Assam Power Distribution Company Limited (APDCL), create medium- and long-term resource plans, optimize power purchase costs, and boost uptake of renewable energy. APDCL is a wholly owned public entity of the Government of Assam that distributes power to different customer categories across the entire state. In 2020, Assam experienced 7,257 million units (MU) of demand, compared to the 9,124 MU projected. The state's total installed generation capacity is 2,124 MW, with an energy mix dominated by coal (63 percent), hydro (30 percent), and solar (7 percent). Power purchase makes up around 85 percent of the total cost for APDCL's entire distribution business. Traditionally, the distribution utility based its medium- and long-term resource plans on compound annual growth rates and historical data trends, which often causes them to overestimate demand. To address this challenge, APDCL partnered with PACE-D 2.0 RE to develop a tool that would help harness variable renewable energy and accommodate the demand impact of cutting-edge innovations such as grid-level storage, electric vehicles, and distributed energy resources. The team conducted a gap analysis and found a clear need for high-end software, scientific methods, and sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to project demand accurately and optimize power procurement. Products already on the market were either cost-prohibitive or not tailored to the realities of India's resource planning. The software, DISCOM REPOSE, is a sophisticated, interactive, robust, and dynamic tool with a comprehensive set of advanced methods for forecasting demand, integrated resource mapping models, and power procurement optimization technology built into three modules. DISCOM REPOSE provides hourly, weekly, and yearly visualizations of demand and resource adequacy over a ten-year horizon. The tool is flexible, allowing utilities to use any of the modules on its own or all three for integrated planning. Users can review different scenarios by varying the generation mix, and the plans optimize resources to lower costs, maximize renewable energy, and reduce emissions. Using DISCOM REPOSE, APDCL is now equipped with AI-driven statistical and scientific methods to estimate demand in an uncertain environment. The demand forecasting module simulates each consumer category by applying the best-fitting statistical and scientific methods, including trend analysis, compound annual growth rate, econometrics, ARIMA, ANN, and partial end use. The software selects the best fit after considering future year growth, R2 (the statistical index), and standard error. DISCOM REPOSE enriches its forecast by adding the impact of policies, demand drivers, and transmission and distribution losses over the next ten years. The resource mapping module optimizes generation commitments after considering each resource's technical and commercial constraints. It can balance a variety of types of resources, including thermal, hydropower, and variable renewables such as wind and solar. By using Monte Carlo simulation techniques and mixed-integer linear programming algorithms, DISCOM REPOSE's resource mapping module helps APDCL keep a finger on the pulse of demand growth and how its portfolio can best meet that demand.