The Telangana Electricity Regulatory Commission (TGERC) has issued the Draft Telangana Electricity Regulatory Commission (Framework for Resource Adequacy) Regulations, 2025, outlining a comprehensive 10-year framework for demand forecasting, generation planning, and procurement.

The draft notification sets out procedures for assessing future load requirements and ensuring the state maintains sufficient firm capacity to meet its share of the national peak demand.

Purpose and Scope

The primary objective is to create a uniform Resource Adequacy (RA) framework enabling the state to meet projected electricity demand reliably while integrating renewable energy, storage, and demand response.

The framework mandates a 10-year planning horizon on an annual rolling basis, with distribution companies (DISCOMs) required to prepare long-term distribution licensee resource adequacy plan (LT-DRAP), medium-term (MT-DRAP), and short-term (ST-DRAP) resource adequacy plans.

Demand Assessment and Forecasting

The draft mandates DISCOMs to undertake hourly or sub-hourly demand forecasting using methodologies compliant with Central Electricity Authority guidelines. Forecasting techniques may include trend analysis, end-use and partial end-use models, autoregressive integrated moving-average (ARIMA) models, artificial intelligence/machine learning/artificial neural network-based models, and econometric tools.

The models must disclose parameters, data sources, and algorithmic processes. DISCOMs must select the methods with the highest R², which quantifies the predictive accuracy of a statistical model, and the lowest standard deviation for each consumer category.

Inputs must include weather data, demographic trends, consumption profiles, agricultural patterns, festival impacts, and the load-shifting effects of policies such as demand-side management (DSM), distributed energy resources, electric vehicle charging, open access, and time-of-day tariffs.

DISCOMs must submit the previous year’s category-wise consumption data to the state load dispatch center (SLDC) by April 21 each year, while the SLDC must provide DSM accounts by the same date. DISCOMs must prepare ST, MT, and LT demand forecasts on a rolling basis using historical and policy-linked variables.

The state transmission utility (STU), with SLDC assistance, must estimate state demand and aggregate DISCOM forecasts, submitting annual projections in MW and million units to the CEA, national load dispatch center, and state load dispatch center by May 31 each year.

Generation Resource Planning

Generation resource planning must incorporate technical and operational characteristics of all existing and upcoming plants, including heat rates, auxiliary consumption, generation limits, ramp rates, start-up times, availability factors, capacity utilization factor for renewables, historical forced outages, planned maintenance, gestation periods, and plant lifetimes.

Renewable Purchase Obligation targets, energy storage obligations, and emissions constraints must also be factored in. DISCOMs must provide complete data for all resources to SLDC and STU.

Capacity Crediting

The regulations prescribe a detailed capacity crediting (CC) methodology using a net-load approach based on chronological hourly data. Gross load is arranged in descending order, followed by the computation of net load after subtracting actual solar and wind generation.

Capacity credit is derived from renewable output during the top 250 load hours, averaged over five years after excluding abnormal years involving natural disasters or force majeure. Hydro CCs must reflect water availability, while thermal CCs must account for coal supply and outage rates.

DISCOMs must submit CC calculations and justifications to SLDC by May 21, and SLDC will compute state-specific CC factors and share them with the national authorities by May 31 every year.

Planning Reserve Margin

Planning Reserve Margin (PRM) must comply with CEA reliability indices based on loss of load probability and normalized energy not served. PRM defines additional capacity required beyond the state’s coincident share in the national peak demand.

SLDC will prepare a 10-year LT-DRAP by incorporating constraints and factoring CC values, PRM, planned retirements, forced outages, and unit-wise generation limits.

SLDC must submit the LT-DRAP to the CEA for validation by September 30 and to the Commission within 15 days of CEA approval. The Commission must approve the plan within 30 days.

DISCOMs must demonstrate 100% capacity tie-up for Year 1 and at least 90% tie-up for Year 2 to meet their share of the national peak. Only contracted resources, long-term, medium-term, or short-term, may be counted. For the next three years, DISCOMs must furnish procurement plans for approval.

Procurement Planning and PPA Approval

The draft mandates least-cost optimization modelling for procurement decisions and requires DISCOMs to balance long-term contracts with medium- and short-term sources.

Contracting must consider resource gestation, grid integration, congestion, stranded asset risks, and consumer tariff impacts. Procurement may be through state or central generating stations, IPPs, CPPs, renewable units, traders, aggregators, exchanges, or bilateral arrangements.

Storage procurement must follow the Ministry of Power tariff-based competitive bidding guidelines. All new or modified long-term and medium-term power purchase agreements require prior approval from the Commission, which will assess necessity, cost, efficiency, and equity. DISCOMs may enter short-term contracts during exigencies but must report details within 15 days.

Monitoring and Compliance

SLDC will monitor adherence to resource adequacy plans and short-term DRAPs, reviewing data daily, monthly, and quarterly. The Commission may levy non-compliance charges, with specifics to be notified later.

The regulations impose extensive data requirements, including 10 years of historical consumption, weather, demographic variables, hourly load patterns, and policy-driven adjustments

Monthly, weekly, day-ahead, and intra-day procurement data must be published on DISCOM and SLDC websites within 45 days, along with Merit Order Dispatch stacks.

DISCOMs must set up a resource adequacy planning cell within three months of the regulations taking effect and a 24×7 procurement cell within 45 days. They must coordinate with central and state generators, STU, SLDC, CEA, and NLDC for availability projections and pricing.

Recently, the Telangana Electricity Regulatory Commission approved amendments to the time-of-day tariff structure for the Southern Power Distribution Company and the Northern Power Distribution Company.

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