RTDA is not about averages. It is about the one month that rewrites the year
There is a comforting habit in power-market analysis: average the numbers and assume the risk evens out. The revised RTDA ledger of Greenko’s Kurnool pumped storage project dismantles that illusion in one glance.
This is not a story about volatility.
It is a story about concentration.
In the revised RTDA, May 2025 alone carries a payable of ₹44.35 lakh. By contrast, August, September, and October together barely cross ₹66,000, with October collapsing to a symbolic ₹991. Read line by line, it feels contradictory. Read structurally, it reveals how deviation settlements actually work.
One month can dominate an entire year
RTDA risk does not distribute itself politely across time. It arrives in bursts. It is spiky, episodic, and capable of compressing an entire year’s financial narrative into a single billing cycle.
In this ledger, May is not just the worst month.
It is the only month that matters.
What makes this sequence revealing is not only the size of the May payable, but what follows it. Once the deviation event is captured and settled, the payable does not fade gradually. It collapses.
June and July drop to zero. August shows only a residual charge. By October, the settlement signal is almost gone. The economics do not smooth out. They snap shut.
What RTDA is actually designed to do
This behaviour exposes the real logic of RTDA.
RTDA is not designed to create a steady stream of settlement revenue. It is built to deliver a shock, force behavioural correction, and then retreat. Once the signal is absorbed, the grid does not keep billing. It watches.
The mechanism is punitive in intensity, not in duration.
The hidden risk for asset owners
For generators and storage asset owners, this is where the real risk sits. Exposure under RTDA is not proportional to frequency, but to intensity. One burst of misalignment — especially on the withdrawal side — can outweigh months of compliant operation.
That cost does not get diluted by good behaviour later. It stands alone, booked early, rewriting the economics of the year in a single stroke.
Containment, not improvement
From the system operator’s perspective, the logic is clear. The objective is not to monetise deviation endlessly. It is to compress it. Once behaviour realigns, scheduling margins tighten, operational controls harden, and the settlement meter slows to near idle.
Seen this way, Greenko Kurnool’s RTDA trail is not a story of improvement over time.
It is a story of containment after impact.
The damage is booked early.
The rest of the year exists to ensure it never happens again.
