Green energy feeders may soon power export, data hubs

New Delhi: India has begun work on exploring a green energy feeder system for green hydrogen manufacturing, large export units and data centres in the country amid rising global demand for green products, multiple people aware of the development said.

The government is looking to identify transmission lines where more than 90% of the time green energy is flowing in a direction for this project, they said.

"The talks are preliminary. The effort should be to supply green energy to all export-oriented production clusters," one of the persons told ET.

Green feeders are dedicated conductors that carry electricity generated from renewable sources and if deployed they will cater directly to green hydrogen plant, data centres or any other load centre. It is a concept that is yet to launch in India.

The Central Transmission Utility is preparing a concept note on the proposed green energy feeder system, based on which further studies could be done, the person quoted above said.


Having green feeders "is like declaring that the electricity being fed into the system is only green," another person said. This will allow manufacturers to easily identify their products as those made from green energy sources.

Currently, green energy can be identified only at the source as the electricity reaching consumers through distribution companies or open access is not differentiated.

"Electrons do not have a colour, so it is difficult to find the flow, but the source of energy can be identified. There are ways to find out which type of electricity is flowing in the grid," a government official said.

However, there are not many transmission lines with more than 90% green energy and the limited few are in high solar and wind concentration areas like Rajasthan's Bikaner and Jodhpur districts and Khavda in Gujarat, an industry official said.