Prayas (Energy Group) hosted the sixth annual roundtable on residential electricity consumption (REC) on October 10, 2023 at the India Habitat Centre. Electricity consumption by the residential sector grew the fastest among all the sectors in the last decade (FY2012-22) at 7.3% CAGR. It is expected to grow more due to increasing incomes, urbanization, and technology advances. It is crucial to systematically examine residential demand and ensure that the future demand is adequate, efficient and well managed. In these annual roundtables, different organizations working on India's REC share their research, analysis, and interventions and exchange their ideas on future work. In the past roundtables, the discussions have been focused on different aspects of the REC such as electricity access, sustainable cooling, and demand response among others. 

This year's roundtable focused on large scale adoption of Utility Driven Demand Side Management (DSM) including Energy Efficiency and Demand Flexibility/Response. DSM is not new in India’s electricity policy and regulatory discourse. Although most of the states have DSM regulations in place, the actual uptake of programs has been minimal. This can be attributed to a lack of strong push by the state regulatory commissions, inadequate assessment of the value of DSM measures, and limited presence of ESCO companies resulting in Discoms implementing the programs themselves. This has the potential to change. The increasing share of variable and intermittent renewable energy (RE) due to policy push and favourable economics has made DSM more valuable. Any reduction in demand due to energy efficiency during non-solar (or non-RE) hours is extremely valuable for the grid and for cost-effective RE grid integration. Demand Response can also provide peak shaving and ancillary services such as ramping support etc. to maintain the grid reliability even during the most stressed periods. Furthermore, increased focus on smart metering has the potential to facilitate effective adoption of DSM by enabling consumer categorisation and better estimation of impacts.

In this context, the participants of the roundtable to discussed several aspects of DSM such as quantification of potential benefits, policy/regulatory barriers, institutional capacity, and strategy options for scaling-up.