Big ideas and projects take too much time to take off in India. Protesting environmentalists, a free media, ballot-happy legislators and the gang are forever finding faults with development. Stay orders in courts, misleading media reports, protests that go beyond the right to freedom of speech are tools that delay power projects, housing schemes, flyovers, highways and industries.
A very dangerous and unpardonable specimen that poses a high risk to development is the uninformed journalist, the media's in-house ignoramus.
In April 2004, several villages near Satara in Maharashtra, the hub of wind energy in India, turned against windmills because they believed that the windmill blades drove away rain clouds, causing a drought.
A local newspaper ran a story 'confirming the villager's concerns': "The large blades of a windmill first attract rain coulds towards them using magnetic power. The blades then slash through the clouds to cut them into pieces, thus affecting rainfall and causing a drought."
Soon, the local MLA sensed that playing the tune of the people and the media is best for future election prospects. The next day he was seen leading a rally demanding the demolition of the thousands of plush windfarms in Satara spread across thousands of acres and worth hundreds of crores of rupees. He even produced rainfall statistical data for the last 4 years, attributing a universally bad monsoon to the windmills' rain-killing tendency.
Not to be left behind in displaying utter stupidity, the country's only Ministry of Renewable Sources of Energy in the Maharashtra government ordered a probe into the issue.
Not one soul of consequence came forward to talk reason for weeks. The controversy died with a big Indian Express story pointing out the stupidity of it all, the only oasis of rationality.
I am a firm supporter of renewable sources of energy, be it big dams and hydro projects, wind, biomass or the lesser prevalent solar and geothermal. With fossil fuel prices going up and the Kyoto Protocol in place, I think they provide a great opportunity for the country to build a cheap and robust power infrastructure from the start and and accumulate carbon credits. So incidents like the one above and the following one evoke a sense of comic frustration in me.
Very respectable publications in their editorials have been creating a lot of hype about offshore wind energy projects. They tout it as the ultimate solution to all power problems in India. One of them even assailed the IPO of Suzlon Wind Energy, world's sixth largest wind ev\nergy equipment manufacturer, because its Red Herring Prospectus did not mention anything about offshore projects. I find this obsession with offshore wind projects preposterous, just as I find rain-water harvesting as a solution to water problems in India plain dumb.
Offshore wind energy projects, incidentally, are windmill farms installed on the sea, a few kms away from the coast, because wind patterns are stronger out there.
India has an on-land wind potential of 45,000 MW, of which a little over 3,000 MW has been installed. The remaining 42,000 begs to be converted to installed capacity. State governments are putting in place laws favourable to renewable energy installation. As much as 875 MW wind capacity was added in 2004 itself, the third largest in the world for that year.
Offshore wind projects are at best a futuristic technology. They are installed mainly due to two reasons, first being the lack of enough landmass in a country for on-land projects (European countries, for example) and the second being opposition from extreme environmentalists who (legitimately) oppose windmills on land because their rotor blades are known to kill migratory birds en masse.
Other than that, offshore projects require nearly five times the investment per MW as on-land wind projects. They cannot be installed in large MW chunks and are still at research stage. The cost of power per unit from offshore projects is insanely astronomical.
Most of all, it is slightly too much to talk vigorously of the expensive offshore wind projects in India when only 7 percent of the on-land potential has been converted.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
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4 comments:
Whoa!!! THAT actually happened?? :-O ...Talking of RWH or off-shore wind projects...Ain't they the ideal cover for the politicos to take shelter for not carrying out doable initiatives !!! ;)
Interesting article...I wish you would have dwelled on the uninformed journalist a bit more...simply because in my opinion they have more influencing power than any local MLA...especially when there is such a dearth of information in remote areas.
My single biggest concern,w.r.t the promotion of alternative sources of energy, is with regards to the estimation of the potential...lobbying from both sides(conventional vs non-conventional) results in hugely varying figures...even if we assume that indeed 45000 MW capacity is possible, another concern is how much of this capacity can practically be converted into real power (we all know how the potential of solar energy is touted). Also, if i remember correctly, wind mill turbines dont have an efficiency of more than 20-30%(so 45000MW will eventually mean abt 9000 to 12000 MW of actual power).
So what I am basically saying(in this overgrowing comment) is that we need to tread this road cautiously, especially since we are a developing nation with rapidly increasing energy needs but still with limited capital to invest in costly but environment friendly alternatives, maybe we can start off by promoting solar energy at the domestic level (water heating is already fairly common) and then move on to large scale projects using all the possible options.
In other news, I might be in Delhi in the second week of October, so hope to catch you before you take off :)
@uRmad: you can read the story from that time here http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=48375
@Sid: Dude, you should start blogging yourself!
Windmills have 20-30 pc efficiency, I agree with you. My point, though, was related to on-land windfarms as compared to offshore.
And solar is too much in its R&D stage to be installed en-masse. Solar is okay for economy-lighting a house and heating water and college science projects, but it is currently exhorbitantly expensive per MW because of high silicon extraction costs and also because its energy source - Sunlight, is unpredictable and diffused in India. There is research going on in using concentrators to reduce solar panel costs. Solar energy, if at all used on a large scale, can be in hybrid projects maybe in a couple of decades.
Someday buddy I am going to get a major firing from you ;)
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