India Reactive Power Compensation Market Is Valued At INR 750 Crores

The Indian power sector has witnessed radical changes in the past decade. The policy landscape in India progressively evolved since independence. The private sector involvement, policy changes, competition and focus on green energy evolved specially with the passing of Electricity Act 2003. Till the early 1990s, the power sector in India was shielded from any private participation.

The penetration of the renewable energy in the overall energy sector in India has shown consistent progress in the last five years. With the formation of the new government and their policies emphasizing on the renewable energy development, the attention towards ensuring stability of the grid increased.

The quality of the power being delivered to the customers and the gap in the demand and supply of the power in the major power crunch India is facing today. Due to the massive load growth in India, the stress on the existing power networks had increased with the transmission lines carrying power near their limits. The grid disturbances have increased as well due to the increase in the complexity of the network and non uniform loading due to abnormal voltages. Reactive power management is to control the generator voltages, compensation, variable transformer tap settings, switchable reactor banks and shunt capacitors plus allocation of new shunt capacitors and reactor banks to achieve voltage control and minimize the losses.

The reactive power compensation market in India has witnessed a year on year growth in the past five years. The demand of the reactive power compensation equipments and services was driven by the industries and government utilities as well.

The reactive power compensation market of India was equally shared by the organized and unorganized sector players. The organized market largely consisted of consumers such as the railways, State Electricity Boards (SEBs), NTPC and other related power sector units and plants, as well as LS manufacturers such as TATA and other core sector industries. The unorganized sector consisted mainly of medium scale and small scale private consumers. In FY’2015, each segment accounted for 50% of the overall demand. The users for reactive power compensation prefer equipments with high economical cost. In most of the case, the users in unorganized segment tend to choose these equipments based on price and others.

The reactive power compensation market of India consisted of a number of players both local and international. The market included major international manufacturers such as ABB, Alstom, Emerson Electric, General Electric and others. A major share was occupied by ABB being a major manufacturer of the power factor quality equipments and service provider.