Scores of pumped storage plant (PSP) proposals are being considered not only in the Western Ghats but across many other river valleys of India, and they raise serious ecological and social concerns. In the course of my ongoing examination of the ecological impacts of these proposals, I found a shocking number of them in Maharashtra alone. I find it extremely worrisome that a single state is considering so many PSPs within its boundaries. Almost all are located in river valleys and need diversion of forest land. The cumulative impact on the ecology and welfare of the state, and of the entire Western Ghats on which the water security of peninsular India depends, should concern all of us. Many of the listed projects have already received environmental clearance or are in advanced stages of the process, yet state governments and the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) seem nonchalant about the consequences for the whole country.
In Maharashtra, six major projects in the advanced development pipeline lie within or close to the Western Ghats. Together they account for about 7,000 MW under construction and another 3,300 MW that has been concurred by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) and awaits construction. Published information from the CEA, the Ministry of Power, the MoEF&CC, the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board and project developers points to a far wider pipeline in the Western Ghats and adjoining Sahyadri catchments. It spans the Karjat–Maval, Malshej Ghat, Koyna–Satara, Raigad, Pune and Kolhapur regions, and involves several thousand megawatts of proposed storage capacity. Many of these projects need substantial forest land. The proposed Saidongar-1 Karjat PSP involves about 233 hectares of forest land, Shirawta PSP about 161 hectares, Bhavali PSP over 200 hectares under its revised forest proposal, and Pawana-Falyan PSP about 129 hectares. The proximity of some proposals to the Sahyadri Tiger Reserve and the Koyna Wildlife Sanctuary makes cumulative ecological assessment all the more important. Forest fragmentation, wildlife movement and the sensitivity of the Western Ghats need careful consideration.
Examining these projects one at a time cannot adequately capture their combined implications for forest fragmentation, biodiversity, wildlife corridors, river catchments, groundwater, geological stability, landslide susceptibility and local water availability, particularly as the climate changes ever faster. The concerned state governments, in coordination with the MoEF&CC, the CEA and the relevant technical institutions, should therefore commission an independent, Western Ghats-wide cumulative impact assessment covering all proposed, approved and under-construction PSPs. No further major PSP should receive final investment approval until its necessity is demonstrated through a technology-neutral assessment. That assessment should compare its full lifecycle economic and environmental costs with battery energy storage systems (BESS), distributed renewable energy storage, demand response and other available alternatives. It should also establish whether the aggregate proposed PSP capacity is actually needed for Maharashtra's long-term electricity system, rather than treating identified project potential or MoU commitments as an established requirement for construction.
The national picture is more worrying still. A few years ago, the Union Ministry of Power identified a PSP potential of 200,000 MW in the country's river valleys. At an average of 1,000 MW per site, that means about 200 sites. Even if only half of that potential is harnessed, around 100 river valley sites would be at credible risk of serious ecological degradation. The August 2026 Government of India backgrounder puts the identified potential even higher, at roughly 345 GW. The Western Region accounts for about 129.7 GW, the Southern Region about 97.8 GW, the Eastern Region about 53.4 GW, the Northern Region about 50.3 GW and the North-Eastern Region about 14.2 GW. With so many potential sites, the environmental acceptability of each project must be assessed with care. That means looking beyond the formal clearances obtained to the quality of its ecological studies, the credible alternatives considered, the effectiveness of its mitigation measures, and the cumulative impact of other developments in the same landscape, state, region and country.
My detailed study of the 2,000 MW PSP proposal in the Sharavathi river valley of Karnataka, along with an overview of proposals in other states, has revealed a troubling ritual among our regulatory authorities, including the MoEF&CC. PSP proposals are cleared without objectively weighing their impact on the specific project area, their cumulative impact on the same landscape, or their effect on the country's overall ecological health. Other problems influence the clearance process too, such as unrealistically high benefit-to-cost ratios in cost-benefit analyses built on unsubstantiated assumptions. All this happens despite clear violations of the Wildlife Protection Act and the Forest Conservation Act, and despite a continuing disregard for the National Forest Policy targets, the climate change consequences and the National Action Plan on Climate Change.
I submitted a high-level cost-benefit analysis of PSP versus BESS for the Sharavathi project, which clearly showed the advantages of BESS. Despite multiple representations, no one has explained why river valley PSPs are preferred over BESS. The power ministry, NITI Aayog, the PMO, and the expert appraisal committee, the National Board for Wildlife and the Forest Advisory Committee under the MoEF&CC have not considered it necessary to clarify why PSPs are critical, even inside protected areas, when far more benign alternatives such as BESS and demand-side management (DSM) exist. It is disconcerting that such projects are being considered in river valleys and protected areas without any substantiation. The absence of a carefully prepared national policy on energy storage, one that weighs the techno-economically suitable options of PSP and BESS, seems to have produced a proliferation of PSPs in ecologically sensitive valleys.
As an electrical engineer and power sector professional with over four decades of experience, I am reasonably confident that so many river valley PSPs, and even a few of them, are not essential for meeting India's growing electricity demand. BESS is a mature technology whose capital costs fall with each passing year. Demand-side management and other techno-economically viable options add to the case. India's renewable energy transition should not treat the destruction of ecologically important natural assets as an assumed or automatically acceptable cost of storing electricity. Public authorities should be able to show, with transparent evidence, why PSPs at specific locations are justified over feasible alternatives.
States such as Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh are considering large numbers of river valley PSPs, and together they account for roughly 85% of the under-construction capacity listed by the CEA. They should treat climate resilience and electricity system planning as closely connected priorities. Instead, they appear to view PSPs mainly as a way of attracting massive private investment and a few meagre financial benefits.
Given the scale of the pipeline, the Ministry of Power and NITI Aayog should commission an independent assessment covering several areas. The first is the national storage requirement. The assessment should establish the actual need for storage capacity and duration through 2030, 2040 and 2050, using technology-neutral resource-adequacy modelling. The second is a basin-wise cumulative environmental assessment, which would evaluate all proposed PSPs within each river basin rather than confining the study to individual project footprints. The third is a comparison of lifecycle economics. PSPs should be weighed against battery storage, distributed renewable energy storage, solar-wind-storage hybrids, demand response and demand-side management, grid interconnections and transmission strengthening, and the optimisation of existing reservoirs. The fourth is a climate and geological risk assessment that accounts for climate-adjusted hydrology, rainfall variability, droughts, extreme precipitation, landslides, seismicity, tunnel stability and reservoir safety. The fifth is a public-domain project database requiring every developer to disclose project capacity and storage duration, upper and lower reservoir coordinates, reservoir volumes and water requirements, forest and non-forest land diversion, annual pumping and generation requirements, guaranteed round-trip efficiency, construction and lifecycle costs, expected commissioning date, and the environmental and social impact assessment. The sixth is an independent justification of the proposed national capacity.
Climate change is projected to have calamitous consequences for the entire country. Forests, biodiversity and freshwater sources must therefore be central to our development paradigm, not casualties of an assumption that every rise in electricity demand must be met by more centralised generation. Governments should weigh a portfolio of energy efficiency, distributed generation, storage, grid reinforcement and flexible demand to meet the growing demand.
Without an effective review of the policies behind these projects, the country's river valleys, freshwater bodies and remaining patches of rich biodiversity risk irreversible damage of enormous consequence to our people. Civil society groups across the country can help avert this by engaging actively with the authorities and persuading them to adopt only those technologies with the lowest overall societal cost, so that natural resources are protected from irrational power sector projects.
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*Power & Climate Policy Analyst
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