The power transmission business is regulated to ensure fair access and prices for users, efficient and reliable operation and to encourage optimal investments. A strong and robust power transmission system is key to reducing the overall cost of power and enhancing system reliability. This assumes even more importance in light of the inevitable transition to integrating high shares of renewables.

The power transmission sector is witnessing rapid growth in capacity and in coverage across India and presents a unique set of opportunities and challenges to policy makers, planners, system users, developers, consumers and other stakeholders. Systematic and timely sharing of accurate data is key for optimal power transmission planning and development of power transmission infrastructure. To facilitate and augment the initiatives of national and state agencies, a national level repository of the various documents and data pertaining to policies, plans, programmes, pricing framework, tariffs and other regulatory developments at the national level and across states has been developed in the form of ‘India Transmission Portal (ITP)’.

The India Transmission Portal is a collaborative initiative of the Prayas (Energy Group) with technical support from Idam Infrastructure Advisory. The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) has provided valuable guidance for the portal. This one stop portal provides easy access to information on the Indian electricity transmission sector for investors, regulators, policy makers, researchers and other stakeholders. It tracks policies and regulations in the transmission sector, data related to transmission planning, performance and tariff at the central level and 11 states.

The portal covers information at the central level and in 11 states of the country. The first three modules of the portal (namely Policy, Commercial and Regulatory) broadly cover the policy and regulatory aspects, including EA, 2003 NTP, NEP, TBCB, GNA, tariff regulations, grid code, etc. These modules provide a brief summary of the documents in a meaningful manner and give an option to download the original documents (~ 140 documents presently in place).

The next three modules (Tariff, Performance and Planning) are mostly data visualizations (~45 tabs with over 90 graphs) based on data aggregated from various orders and documents placed in the public domain by CERC / SERCs and CTU/STUs, POSOCO and CEA. These include the transmission charges (LTOA/MTOA/STOA) and ARR of transmission licensees, transfer capability at regional level and transmission planning at inter and intra-regional and intra-state level. Along with this, transmission planning for RE integration has been added to the website recently and we plan to add information about cross-border trade as well. All these graphs are interactive (one can select different time periods / voltages / states / ownership etc. depending on the graph and data behind it), sharable and downloadable.

Along with this, we have also clubbed some of the important orders issued by Supreme Court and APTEL and reports published by government and other entities on the transmission sector under the last module, namely Resources (23 in total as of now). We also plan to write some short articles on current issues and topics related to transmission in the future.