From Project Based to Basinwide approach in hydropower

The chronic shortage of electricity supply in India impedes economic development and poverty reduction. More than 40 percent of households, most of them in rural areas, lack access to electricity. With the aim of extending access to electricity to all households by 2012, the government has launched a program to add 100,000 megawatts of generating capacity. Recognizing that meeting much of this need with hydropower, a renewable energy resource, offers many advantages, the government calls for its expansion from 24 percent of the country’s generation capacity today to almost 40 percent by 2012.

With this national development objective in mind, Himachal Pradesh ,Uttarakhand, Sikim and Arunachal Pradesh(to name a few), have launched ambitious programs to harness their substantial hydropower potential. All these States are pursuing an untried and thus some what risky strategy of attracting public and private developers to build and operate hydropower projects.

Many of the private developers are new to the sector, and their ability to manage the hydrological, geological, construction, and commercial risks of the sector is still untested.

How the project approach falls short?

• Failure to take account of the power-system-wide implications of developing multiple generation projects on the same river.
• While the project-based approach entails an assessment of environmental and social impacts stemming directly from the individual project, other impacts may emerge—or may emerge in a more severe form—only when the entire river basin is taken as the unit of analysis. One example is the cumulative impact of multiple projects on soil erosion ,reservoir sedimentation and EFR. 
• Long-term planning concerns that typically fall outside the scope of an individual project. An example is the vulnerability of the river basin and related ecosystems to climate change, which could adversely affect a river’s hydrological patterns and volume of water flows, the length and intensity of the monsoon season, or the frequency and severity of floods.

Steps toward a basinwide approach

• Hydrological yield estimation can be vastly improved through coordinated collection of hydrological and meteorological data and dissemination of those data to developers. Similarly, central studies could estimate the effects of climate change, an important aspect that individual developers are likely to ignore.

Conclusion:

Comprehensive river basin planning is a major undertaking. Establishing a baseline and developing the necessary skills, tools, guidelines, and operating framework could take several years, but this work could be completed in phases. Undertaking basinwide economic, social, and environmental assessments as well as basinwide yield estimations would be important initial steps.