The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) invited comments from stakeholders on the draft National Electricity Plan (Vol-I Generation). The National Electricity Plan (NEP) is a crucial guiding document for the electricity sector. It serves as a reference for key sector trends and helps various stakeholders, such as generating companies, transmission utilities, and distribution licensees, with medium and long-term planning. 
Towards ensuring a robust NEP and enhancing transparency in the proposed guidelines, Prayas (Energy Group) suggested the following:

• The draft NEP must be revised based on 20th EPS projections and finalised based on public consultation.
• Transparency must be ensured in the modelling studies and scenarios considered, and toward this end open source modelling should be preferred and input parameters and assumptions must be available in the public domain. Also, in order to better represent ground realities within the sector, broader scope of scenarios must be considered.
• In addition to reflecting the finalised 20th EPS projections, the demand estimations must also account for crucial ongoing and potential sector changes, such as sales migration, impact of time-of-day tariffs, solarisation of agriculture, etc.
• Given that RE is an integral part of the power system, and its role is only going to grow, RE must be integrated with other generation sources, instead of being separately assessed.
• There were also lacunae and discrepancies within the draft document which need to be addressed or further clarified, such as the consideration of energy savings in demand estimation, variation in specific coal consumption, etc.