Energy Scenario and Policy Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Something over eighty per cent of crude is imported, which makes the oil bill the single largest element of the country's energy import cost and the chief energy security concern. Coal is imported too, but domestic production supplies the bulk.

Answer: D

It combines physical availability, affordability and resilience against disruption, and total self-sufficiency is neither achievable nor economic for most countries. Diversifying sources and suppliers is the usual instrument.

Answer: A

A country buying from one supplier is exposed to that supplier's politics and its outages, whereas five suppliers reduce any single failure to a manageable share. Strategic reserves address a different and complementary risk.

Answer: B

Industry takes something over a third, with transport and the domestic sector the next largest, which is why industrial efficiency schemes address the biggest single block. Agriculture is a large consumer of electricity in particular, largely for pumping.

Answer: C

Correct answer: irrigation pumping

Almost all agricultural electricity in India goes to pumping water for irrigation, and the sector accounts for something like a fifth of national consumption. The pumps are often inefficient and, because the supply is heavily subsidised or unmetered, there is little incentive to improve them - which is why pump replacement and agricultural feeder separation are recurring policy measures.

Answer: D

They comprise the technical losses in lines and transformers together with theft, which is why the figure in some systems is far above what physics alone would give. The difference between billed and collected is a separate commercial loss.

Answer: A

Correct answer: the failure to collect payment for energy billed

Transmission and distribution loss measures only the energy that fails to reach a paying meter. The aggregate technical and commercial figure adds the billing and collection failure, so it reports energy sent out against revenue actually realised. That is a more honest measure of a utility’s health, and the gap between the two numbers is where theft and uncollected bills sit.

Answer: B

Correct answer: 22 per cent

\[ \frac{1000-780}{1000} = \frac{220}{1000} = 22\%. \] Loss is the shortfall as a fraction of the energy input, so it is 22 per cent and not 28 - that would come from dividing 220 by 780, comparing the loss against the sales rather than against the input.

Answer: C

Seventy-eight per cent billed multiplied by ninety per cent collected leaves 70.2 per cent realised, so the aggregate loss is 29.8 per cent. The two components compound rather than add, which is why the combined figure is the meaningful one.

Answer: D

A station at sixty per cent load factor has produced three fifths of what continuous full output would have given. Falling load factors on coal stations as renewables are despatched ahead of them is a central feature of the current system.