The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) has released the second part of its 19^th Electric Power Survey (EPS), which forecasts the power consumption across 20 cities in India.

The forecast is vital for the power sector to meet the future requirement of various segments and assess electricity demand on a medium and long-term basis. So far, 18 such surveys have been conducted. The 19th EPS Committee, constituted by the CEA in June 2015, carried out EPS of 45 mega-cities as well.

The 20 cities covered in the part-II of the survey include- Agra, Aurangabad, Bengaluru, Gangtok, Hyderabad, Jammu, Jodhpur, Kanpur, Kolkata, Kota, Lucknow, Mumbai, Nagpur, Srinagar, Port Blair, Pune, Ranchi, Surat, Varanasi & Vishakhapatnam.

According to the report, Mumbai leads the energy requirement with 21,977 Million Units (MU) of energy demand in 2019-2020. The city’s need is expected to rise by 2.37% in 2024-2025 to 24,709 MU.

Hyderabad comes second on the list with 21,799 MU. The city’s requirement will rise by 6.63% in 2024-2025 to 30,054 MU, which is significantly higher than Mumbai.

This prediction is based on the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) that is used to measure the average yearly growth over a period of time.

Interestingly, Ranchi’s energy requirement in terms of CAGR is higher than Hyderabad at 6.81% in 2029-2030, albeit Ranchi’s current energy demand is only 1,986 MU and is expected to rise to 3,836 MU in the next decade.

The report also forecasts the transmission and distribution (T&D) loss each city will face in the next ten years. Vishakhapatnam had the lowest T&D losses in 2019-2020 at 3.80%, which is likely to remain flat throughout the decade.

Meanwhile, Srinagar suffered the highest T&D loss in 2019 at 48%, which is expected to drop to 28% by 2029-2030.

CEA’s latest Load Generation Balance Report (LGBR) showed that India is likely to have an energy surplus of 2.7% and a peak surplus of 9.1% for the year 2020-21. The latest LGBR report anticipates that the Northern, Western, Southern, and North-eastern regions will see surplus energy generation of 4.7%, 3.3%, 2.2%, and 2.8%, respectively, in 2020-21.

Notably, between April and June 2020 (Q2), nearly 15.7 billion units of electricity were generated from solar-based sources, according to data from the CEA, a 26% increase compared to the same period last year.