A power system should have quality and consistency of power supply as one of the important features. There are significant reforms over the past many years, leading to various developments in the sector. Various challenges faced by power sector may be due to power shortages during peak hours, over drawls by distribution companies, frequency variations due to unmanaged variation in the Renewable Generation and congestion in the networks. A few noticeable grid failures have also been reported in the recent past. The delicensing of generation and restructuring of electrical supply industry has to create a competitive environment among the generators and healthy market conditions for the consumers. This has led to reduce cost of energy generation, distribution and would certainly eliminate some of the inefficiencies present in the system. However with more and more renewable generation addition along with increased expansion and complexity of grid, there felt a need of a mechanism for support services that helps in improved quality and reliability of supply. These are called Ancillary Services. The Central Electricity Regulatory Commission has introduced Ancillary Services in India. This paper discusses some important concerns of ancillary services, related issues and the proposed framework.
Ancillary Services, Deregulation, Power sector, Frequency regulation, Reserves, un-requisitioned surplus, nodal agency, unbundling, blackout
