"PUMPED STORAGE SCHEMES - ITS IMPACT ON OVERALL POWER DEVELOPMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF OPTIMUM UTILISATION OF WATER POWER

Abstract

Electricity is one of the basic infrarstructures for the growth of economy of a country and its index - in the form of per capita consumption-. forms a measure of the living standards of its people_. Every developing country, therefore, in atriving to have accelerated development of'its economy has resorted to increasing the power generation and distribution facilities, on an ambitious scale and have set up vast power system networks to meet the demand for electricity put forward by its people wherever and whenever wanted,. The mea.n task of the power system therefore is to be always in readiness to cater to the demand put on it both in quality and reliability and plan their growth in close unison with the pace of industrial and economical development of the country. Though its chief aim is to satisfy its consumers by providing them with electricity of quality, and relia-bility, the power systems have to from the point of view of supplier,; meet the demand economically too. Towards this end, there is a constant endeavour by the power systems to make use of the advancing technology towards in-creasing its .operational efficiency and devicing 2 measures of meeting the demand economically. In the initial stages of power development the demands were small and isolated, and were satisfactorily not by comparatively smaller and independent power sta-tions located nearby . But in the intermediate stages , as the systems expanded, the demand for electricity grew on a fantastic scale, compelling the power systems to look for ways and means of meeting them with reliability and proper quality. This necessitated pooling together of the resources of various power systems through coordi-nated and interconnected operations aid installation of inter system tie-lines, etc thus improving the economics of operation of existing facilities and better reliability. However, in modern times, the demand for elect-ricity has reached spectacular proportions making the power systems more complex and huge, With this tremendous load growth and the present pattern of daily load factor of operation - which is of the order of 70% on an average in India - the peaking requirements of the modern power systems necessitate selection of particular type of power generating facilities at the planning stage itself, so that all the power station in the system could be assi-gned specific roles of operatics according to their inherent characteristics in meeting theload, in the most economical and reliable way.