Kushan Mitra
Dramatic advances in power technology are making the impossible of a decade ago quite simply possible. Just like mobile telephony allowed India to hop, skip and jump through decades of technological progress; advances in solar technology hold the future to powering up India.
Very early on in school, students are taught that life on earth, in fact everything on earth, ultimately owes its existence to the power of the sun. Plants, through photosynthesis, convert minerals and nutrients into plant matter, and eventually animals eat those plants, and so on and so forth. This conversion of carbon into matter by plants, is what powers a majority of India, as pre-historic plant matter in the form of coal is what lights up the bulbs and spins the fans in most Indian homes.
Close to 60 per cent on installed power generation in India comes from thermal plants fired by coal; a higher percentage of power generated comes from coal. Coal-fired plants are the backbone of India’s energy requirements and this is why after the Supreme Court cancelled the haphazard coal-mine allotment process followed by the previous regime this government went on overdrive trying to formulate a new coal policy and auctioned mines with minimal disruption.
The coal mine block auction has not been without its critics, and indeed some legal challenges, particularly over claims of collusion. However, as India’s short-term requirements for coal increase as several new coal-fired thermal power plants come on-stream over the next few years, the government was left with little choice if it had to fulfill its promise of 24×7 power across India.
However, coal is not a clean source of energy. The carbon-intensive product lot only increases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but also is a prime source of suspended particulate matter. No matter what one’s take on climate change is, there is little doubt that air quality throughout India has decreased considerably, particularly in cities like Delhi. While vehicular pollution is clearly a cause of reduced air quality, India’s growing power needs and thus appetite for coal is undoubtedly a leading cause.
It is unlikely that quasi-judicial bodies like the National Green Tribunal can make significant rulings against coal power. The NGT will be hard-pressed to act against power plants lest India be plunged into darkness.Any action on coal will need to find a level of pragmatism.
Of course, there are technologies that can lead to higher efficiencies in coal burning and the capturing of particulate matter before it is released into the atmosphere, but India will need to find a way to de-addict itself from the massive amounts of coal it consumes – a need that is estimated to top 1.2 billion tonnes of coal by 2020.
Even though India burns less coal per capita than many Western countries – it still burns less coal per capita than many developed nations did over a century ago, India’s neighbour, China, whose massive industrial development was powered by coal-fired power plants, actually reduced coal-consumption in 2014, as has been widely-reported. China reduced coal use by 2.9 per cent in 2014 and coal production also fell 2.5 per cent after a decade of rises of between five per cent and10 per cent. This actually meant that China reduced its global greenhouse emissions by two per cent last year in an aim to meet the targets that Presidents Xi Jinping and Barack Obama set in bilateral talks last year.
However, these reductions are not because China has changed its policy stand on climate change. But local population concerns about pollution, particularly when major Chinese population centres such as Beijing were enveloped in smog, have been major reasons for China’s cutback on thermal power. Thousands of runners in the Beijing marathon last year wore face-masks.
And Beijing has used its new-found industrial might as another reason to cut back on coal consumption. China’s factories have been churning out windmills and photovoltaic cells by the gigawatt. It was estimated that China added over 20 gigawatts of wind power capacity in 2014 alone; to put that into perspective, India’s estimated installed wind-power capacity at the end of February 2015 stood at 22.4 gigawatts.
But there is the joker in the pack: Solar power from photovoltaic cells and solar concentration. The biggest argument against solar power has always been the huge costs of solar cells. It was long argued that the cost of solar cells was a mitigating factor in the adoption of solar power and that without subsidies, only rich, environmentally-minded Governments could afford. Thus solar was a no-go area.
But from over $30 per watt in 1977, when commercially available solar cells became available to the public, the price per watt of a solar cell is now $0.30. On a shorter timeline, a unit of solar power, from costing over three times that of an unit of thermal power when the price of the production facility was amortised, now stands almost at parity. In India, car manufacturers such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Maruti have installed solar cells on their roofs, that have helped them defray a certain part of their regular power consumption. BMW India’s Chennai plant should have its entire roof covered with solar cells by early 2016, and that could bring down its electricity consumption by 20 per cent.
