In an interaction with Industry Outlook, Sreekumar Panicker,Vice President Engineering and Operations, Eaton India shares his views on how power management is evolving in India with the shifting pattern of consumption.
Power management is becoming a growing business strategy across all sectors. How do you see the current evolution of the Power management market in India?
With the current trend towards smart city efforts, combined with the government's entire electrification ambition and the “Make in India” initiative to promote the manufacturing segment,
power management in India has become a prominent emphasis. Additionally, the shifting focus of the nation towards Electronic Vehicles and Renewable sources of energy as a greener alternative is coming up with new sets of challenges for the power management industry to innovate and upgrade the power management solutions that can fit the changing needs to “manage”.
The recent surge in demand for power and electrification along with the transition from traditional to renewable, demands a total transformation and modification of the prevalent infrastructure from power generation to distribution. In the coming days, one of the vital issues will be to amalgamate the existing national power grid system with the renewable source along with smart storage. I think one of the biggest questions for the power management firms will be regarding the role that we play in the coming days and the innovations that we bring into life.
The surge in power demand across multiple segments is calling for new initiatives to meet with the same. In this situation, what are the major challenges in front of the power management segment?
In the coming days, grid instability would be one of the most significant concerns with the arrival of various sources of energy. To be particular, once you have multiple sources of energy that are powering the grid, like coal, wind, solar, or biogas, the stability of the grid becomes a major source of concern. This is where smart grids will play an invaluable role and a surge in the demand for smart grids will also be noticed in the near future. In addition to smart grids, lots of transformations in respect to systems and components will also come into play.
I also feel storage is going to be one aspect that will be revolutionized. Today, the chemistry behind the batteries is getting evolved, and also high output batteries are coming into play. With the recent surge in the power demand across the different segments, one of the vital challenges in front of power management is to deliver batteries with high efficiency and increased storage capacity.
In addition, things like clean energy, diminishing power outages, cheap electricity matched with reliable and safe power are also some of the biggest challenges lying ahead in front of the power management segment.
