The advisers who wrote the grid's big report were proved right within hours, in the middle of the rainy season
The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister released Working Paper 53, "The Duck and The Camel", on 7 July. Authors Sanjeev Sanyal and Satvik Dev argue that solar has pinned midday prices to the floor and pushed the stress into the evening: on an average May day, the exchange's lowest price fell from Rs 2.81 a unit in 2023 to Rs 1.11 in 2026, while the evening peak rose from Rs 8.08 to Rs 9.71 — a spread of Rs 8.60, held down only by the Rs 10 ceiling.
The folder's own market files show the pattern surviving into the monsoon, when clouds are supposed to soften it. For power delivered on 7 July, the day-ahead market cleared at Rs 400.11 per MWh — 40 paise a unit — in the 1 pm hour, and at Rs 7,374.81 in the 10 pm hour.
The real-time market touched the Rs 10,000 per MWh ceiling in the midnight hour, and intraday contracts for the 10 pm and 11 pm hours traded at the full cap.
The camel is the paper's winter warning: in January the midday trough has now sunk below the night-time floor — about 143 GW against 151 GW this year — so the grid's quietest hour is no longer 3 am but 1 pm.
Meanwhile the May evening ramp has doubled from 36 GW in 2023 to 74 GW, and the morning ramp-down has nearly tripled to 53 GW.
The paper says flattening half of one summer evening's climb needs about 130 GWh of discharge, against a battery-plus-pumped-hydro fleet that discharged 23.8 GWh a day in May. The market data in this folder suggests the arbitrage paying for that storage is now available even in July.
Storage developers and flexible generators stand to benefit from an arbitrage spread that persists even during the monsoon, when the price gap was expected to narrow.
Grid planners and policymakers face a structural challenge that the working paper frames clearly: the system's stress point has shifted from generation capacity to timing.
Watch whether battery-plus-pumped-hydro discharge capacity scales toward the roughly 130 GWh needed to flatten even half of a summer evening's demand climb.
The paper's winter warning about the midday trough sinking below the night-time floor is a signal to track as the seasons turn.
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