PV applications can address problems of faulty power system: study

KARACHI: Strategically sited grid-support solar photovoltaic (PV) applications are one of the most effective tools to address the challenges of a leaky transmission and distribution system and regional disparities in power access—advocates a new study by Policy Research Institute for Equitable Development.

According to the study launched on Monday, solar photovoltaic (PV) applications can provide many values to a transmission and distribution system. In addition to resource indigenization, energy generation close to the end users is now seen as a novel solution for reducing losses.

These applications could play an instrumental role in loss reduction experienced by electric utilities—including both technical and non-technical losses by potentially deferring transformer and transmission line upgrades, equipment maintenance interval extension and distribution system reliability improvement. This, however, needs a facilitative business model solution.

Pakistan is not only characterized by the absence of such emerging models but also the current debate reflects very poorly on this ‘absence’ as the major preventing factor. Third-party solar, and public-private partnerships between a utility and third-party investor could emerge as a potential commercial solution for solarizing high-loss feeders.

Naila Saleh, project manager at Agora EW and technical advisor at PRIED, said optimal placement of solar PV is not only imperative for improving economics by reducing losses in the distribution sector and ending discriminatory load-shedding in high-loss zones—but also for the net-zero de-carbonization drive.

“Pakistan has a positive advantage from starting a planning process which is more oriented toward sustainable and clean energy supply, rather than trying to use an old planning system that was made for different goals and for old technologies.”

“More thinking also needs to go into well-planned integration of this added capacity, and flexibility of customer-sited solar. Right economic signals need to be set for coupling solar with distributed energy storage—which will provide much-needed flexibility on the distribution network. It will allow customers to consume more solar generation on-site, rather than exporting to the grid and could unlock a much higher penetration of solar at the decentralized level,” Saleh added.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022