The Maharashtra State Load Despatch Center (MSLDC) has written to qualified coordinating agencies (QCAs) in the state asking them to pay their bills for renewable energy deviation settlement mechanism (RE-DSM) for January and February 2020.

The notice was issued on June 24, 2020. The subsidiary of the Maharashtra State Electricity Transmission Company addressed its letter to Tata Power Renewable Energy Limited (TPREL), Manikaran Analytics, Vedanjay Power, Sharda Constructions, Statkraft Markets, REConnect, Kreate Technologies, and the Maharashtra State Electricity Department Limited (MSEDCL).

These letters are routinely issued by the MSLDC to notify QCAs of their renewable energy DMS dues. The QCAs Mercom spoke with informed that Maharashtra has been issuing the bills to QCAs regularly.

Tata Power reached out to Mercom to clarify that their payments have been made. The company said that it had made the payments based on the provisional DSM invoices in the month of March 2020 for January 2020 DSM dues, and in the month of May 2020 for February 2020.

In June, MERC rescheduled the implementation of its DSM regulations from June 1, 2020, to October 5, 2020. Initially, it was decided that the commercial arrangement should come into effect by April 1, 2020. But given the various pending activities and also the subsequent outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the Commission notified that the date for enforcing the regulations would be June 1, 2020. It later realized that there was a need to provide more time for further activities such as trial run operations of the newly developed software, new mechanism, and validation of trial run results.

In its letter, the MSLDC had asked the QCAs to pay the eight bills (weekly) within the due date to avoid delayed payment charges. It cited the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission’s (MERC) regulations, which stated that deviation charges, if not paid within ten days from the issue of the bill, will attract a late payment surcharge (LPS) of 1.25% per month.

The MSLDC also noted that if deviation charges were not paid within 90 days from the date of the issue of the bills, they would be adjusted from the respective corpus and action will be taken as per the MERC’s regulations for forecasting, scheduling, and deviation settlement of solar and wind generation.

Last year, Mercom had reported that the Maharashtra Commission exempted renewable energy qualified coordinating agencies for meter reading, data collection, and communication from paying scheduling and forecasting charges. However, the initial corpus that QCAs must deposit remained unchanged.

In March, the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission also rescheduled the implementation of the fifth amendment of deviation settlement regulations from April 1, 2020, to June 1, 2020. The existing regulations at the time (Regulation 7) were allowed to be valid until May 31, 2020.  The move came in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak in the country.

Advisory: This article has been corrected to reflect that MSLDC’s letter was not a reminder issued to the QCAs, but only an intimation asking them to pay their bills before the due date.