The Appellate Tribunal for Electricity has directed a state distribution licensee to compensate a wind power generator, referred to here as Anantgiri Windfarms Ltd., for the revenue it lost during a series of backing-down instructions the discom issued over several months, holding that the discom had failed to place on record any grid-security constraint, transmission congestion, or merit-order justification for the curtailment.
Under the "must-run" status typically accorded to wind and solar generation, a discom is ordinarily required to accept the full output of a renewable generator except where genuine technical constraints, such as grid instability, transmission bottlenecks, or system security concerns, require curtailment, and even then, curtailment is expected to follow a documented, non-discriminatory protocol rather than being invoked as a matter of commercial convenience when demand is otherwise soft.
The Tribunal found that the discom's own internal records did not disclose any such technical constraint at the relevant times, and that the curtailment appeared instead to track periods when the discom was seeking to reduce its overall power purchase cost by backing down the more expensive renewable capacity in favour of cheaper conventional sources. A rationale the "must-run" framework does not permit as a stand-alone justification.
The Tribunal directed the discom to compute and pay compensation calculated on the deemed generation the wind plant would have achieved but for the curtailment, based on historical generation data for comparable periods, and cautioned that discoms invoking curtailment going forward must contemporaneously record the specific technical basis for each instance.