#wrpc

Western Region’s newest settlement sheets land with a jolt: ancillary revenues have fallen by nearly half in just two weeks, and whatever money is still on the table is being captured by a very small club of stations — mainly NTPC’s flex-optimised coal units and a couple of fast-response gas plants.

Everyone else, especially the older coal fleet, has been pushed into a corner where inflexibility isn’t just a technical handicap — it’s becoming an economic one.

Flexibility Wins. Hesitation Bleeds.

Solapur, Gadarwara and Khargone continued to behave like precision-tuned flexibility engines. Even with shrinking TRAS/SRAS liquidity, these stations kept monetising commitment and reserve windows with almost surgical timing. Gandhar and Kawas turned every viable TRAS event into real money.

But the pattern flips completely at VSTPS, Mouda and NSPCL. Their data trail is full of over-commitment on day-ahead schedules, sharp corrective down-regulation, weak AGC discipline and penalties accumulating across SCUC, SRAS and even TRAS.

In a fortnight where discipline mattered more than brute capacity, the gap became impossible to ignore.

The Tariff Fiction Cracks

For years, tariff design has politely assumed that all coal megawatts behave the same. Fixed charges flatten out differences. PPAs hide fleet-level variability.

But WRPC’s data cuts through that fiction. Supercritical NTPC units and RLNG gas plants are operating like market-ready flexibility products, while older sub-critical units are paying heavily for their inability to follow signals — yet both still enjoy similar fixed-charge treatment.

This leaves regulators staring at a very real fork in the road:

• Treat ancillary performance as a pure reward-penalty overlay, or • Hard-wire flexibility into the tariff structure itself, through differentiated capacity charges or explicit flexibility adders.

Either way, the status quo is running out of room.

A Quiet but Strategic Reordering

Plants that haven’t upgraded AGC behaviour or scheduling discipline are, in effect, subsidising the transition to a volatile, RE-heavy grid. The handful that have invested in flexibility are quietly stacking recurring ancillary income — the kind that funds automation, digital controls and skilled operations teams.

If this continues for a few quarters, the Western Region’s coal fleet will split into two classes: those surviving on energy + fixed charges, and those treating ancillary revenue as a core business line, not a bonus.

The Bigger Question Hanging Over WRPC

This fortnight isn’t just another settlement update. It is the early script of WRPC’s next structural argument:

Who pays for inflexibility? Who gets rewarded for ramping on command? And how long can tariff design ignore what the ancillary numbers already make painfully clear?

The grid is changing — and this is what the change looks like when it hits the balance sheet.