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Coal plays an essential role in our global energy mix, particularly in India and the developing world through electricity generation. This fossil fuel has gained prominence due to its availability in abundance in the bowels of earth, lack of disastrous impact like nuclear plants do, and favourable economics it continues to enjoy in power generation

At the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), COP 21 in Paris, a resolution on limiting the use of coal across countries was one of the proposals put up for consideration.

Currently, renewable energy costs are generally higher than that of fossil-based and nuclear energy. In addition to this, unlike well-established conventional designs and technologies, the advancement in different RE technologies still requires substantial investments and research and development

Developers interest in setting up of more coal based generating has not waned yet. The present lull is only a temporary phase. India will continue to be a potential investment destination because of huge demand supply gap.

While exact numbers and figures will be hard to come by, for long Indian power producers have suffered great losses due to idle capacity. The recently enacted Power Tariff Policy has, however, brought relief to the industry.

The power sector of the country seems to be full of contradictions - there are about 300 million people who do not have access to power, about a third of the population is not lucky enough to escape scheduled and unscheduled power outages, but about 25,000 MW of installed capacity is unable to find buyers, the reason is that most of the power distribution companies (Discoms) are unable to buy enough power to cater their customers´ needs and even if they are ready to do so, there are not enough transmission lines to transfer excess power from pockets of plenty to the needy geographies.

Stranded assets could be valued at Rs 150,000 crore (at an average of Rs 7.5 crore per MW), which is staggering, to say the least. Going by the perceived idle capacity of 20,000 MW, the cumulative losses incurred by the power companies every year come to around Rs 12,000 crore on fixed cost alone.

May refer CEA site for the above info. The idle capacity is mainly in gas power stations due to lack of fuel or no takers for high cost power because of expensive imported gas fuel or no PPAs. India does not have much gas resource.

Smart grid is an evolving set of various technologies, especially information and communication technologies, working together to improve the present grid.