Rooftop solar has become increasingly commonplace in recent years. But just three years ago, when Prudhvitej Immadi took up the position of Chairman and Managing Director of Eastern Power Distribution Company of Andhra Pradesh (APEPDCL), it was a very different story.
The industry’s momentum has gathered pace on the back of numerous shifts in the energy space, according to Immadi.
“There are complete changes in the paradigm in which we are thinking about distribution of energy also,” he tells The CEO Magazine.
“So now we are talking about distributed renewable energy, feeder-level solarization of agriculture consumers. This entire paradigm was not there three years ago.”
The government of India is helping to drive this evolution, with financial incentives and localized infrastructure programs helping to drive adoption of renewable energy. These initiatives come as the country works toward the ambitious targets set by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu, with the state working toward 160 gigawatt-hours of renewable capacity by 2030.
“There’s a greening of the entire distribution sector,” Immadi says. “When we started this, the state as a whole, we were at 22nd, 23rd place in the country in terms of rooftop solar penetration. Now, we are at sixth place in the country – an achievement we have brought about in the last three years.”
In collaboration with
Shirdi Sai Electricals
Furthermore, while APEPDCL has 40 percent of the consumer base, it contributes more than 50 percent of the entire state’s capacity installations making it a front-runner among the state’s distribution companies.
“Operationally, we have been a very well-performing distribution utility in the sense that our transmission and distribution losses are among the best in the country,” Immadi says. “But even in the last three years, we have continuously brought down our losses from 6.2 percent to 5.8 percent. And then this year we have closed at 5.6 percent.”
Funding injection
This reduction is the result of major investments in distribution infrastructure, with APEPDCL building more than a hundred substations in the past three years.
“We have invested in 11-kilovolt feeders, invested in distribution transformers,” he adds. “We have a large geographic span. We are covering 11 districts with seven million consumers with more than 1,000 distribution substations. So among such large distribution companies, we are the best in the country.”
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For Immadi, this acceleration over the past three years is a sign that he made the right decision when he took up his current position in 2023. But APEPDCL’s surging digital prowess is a further sign of success, in his view, with its consumer mobile app gathering force by the day.
“Now, more than 90 percent of our revenues are accruing digitally, which used to be just 50–60 percent,” he explains.
“I have personally learned a lot about how to build these IT systems at scale and how to integrate various operations of such a huge organization where various teams are using different IT applications. They used to talk less to each other, but by making these applications talk more to each other, we can bring a lot of efficiencies into the system.”
APEPDCL has also become one of the first distribution companies to completely map its distribution assets up to low-tension poles and also onto the Geographic Information System (GIS) network. All new additions into the network also get updated as and when they get charged into its GIS map.
Hyperscalers
Meanwhile, the company’s growth is guaranteed by increased electricity consumption in all categories of consumers. But an exciting shift is in the making that is set to further boost the state’s power needs.
“Google is investing more than US$15 billion into their AI hub being Visakhapatnam,” Immadi said, highlighting the project, fondly known as Vizag, as an anticipated one-gigawatt load.
“Reliance has also recently approved a more than US$17 billion investment into Vizag. And ArcelorMittal, they are building their largest integrated steel plant – not in Vizag, but 100 kilometers away.”
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The Vizag data centers are scheduled to be operational from the middle to the end of 2028, according to Immadi, with loads expected to gradually increase as a result of the launches.
“All of these new industrial loads that are coming, we have to serve them all. And serving the hyperscaler kind of a load is very different from serving regular industrial loads because of the nature of the load that data centers have.”
Managing the grid has become a technical challenge in itself, with APEPDCL committed to doing so in a way that it doesn’t affect either reliability or affordability of electricity for other consumers.
“So now we are in the process of learning from these grids where already large-scale integration of hyperscalers has happened and so that we don’t face similar challenges like those grids are facing where there are reliability issues to other consumers and where there are affordability issues also,” he explains.
“But growth for us is coming from all these large industry loads that are coming into the state.”
Ambitious undertaking
One of the biggest challenges facing APEPDCL is its recalibration of energy sources, with the company owned mainly by thermal and hydropower plants.
“But now we are integrating renewable energy in large scale,” Immadi says.
“Currently, 25 percent of our energy needs are already met from green sources – wind and solar – and all new capacity additions are happening in renewable energy. There are no new thermal plants that we can see in the future coming up. All new load is being met from renewable energy and that brings a lot of challenges into the grid.”
One such issue of solar is that it cannot be generated through the night, with wind power also seasonal and erratic. As a result, during the morning and evening peaks, APEPDCL must buy from energy exchanges at a very high cost.
“Wind generation can drop suddenly from 2,000 megawatts to 200 megawatts and we still have to manage the grid,” he points out. ”So now we have started to build battery storage assets so that any such intermittencies in the grid can be met from battery storage.”
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APEPDCL has also recently entered into battery storage agreements with various developers.
“Those assets will probably come into the grid in the next one to one-and-a-half years, but a lot more investment into storage is required,” he says.
“We are working in that direction where whatever growth we can see industrially or domestically can be met from renewable sources.”
