Renewable Energy For India

KHADODA, India — Solar power is a clean energy source. But in this arid part of northwest India it can also be a dusty one.

Every five days or so, in a marriage of low and high tech, field hands with long-handled dust mops wipe down each of the 36,000 solar panels at a 63-acre installation operated by Azure Power. The site is one of the biggest examples of India’s ambitious plan to use solar energy to help modernize its notoriously underpowered national electricity grid, and reduce its dependence on coal-fired power plants.

Azure Power has a contract to provide solar-generated electricity to a state-government electric utility. Inderpreet Wadhwa, Azure’s chief executive, predicted that within a few years solar power would be competitive in price with India’s conventionally generated electricity.

“The efficiency of solar technology will continue to increase, and with the increasing demand in solar energy, cost will continue to decrease,” Mr. Wadhwa said.

Two years ago, Indian policy makers said that by the year 2020 they would drastically increase the nation’s use of solar power from virtually nothing to 20,000 megawatts — enough electricity to power the equivalent of up to 15 million modern American homes during daylight hours when the panels are at their most productive. Many analysts said it could not be done. But, now the doubters are taking back their words.

Dozens of developers like Azure, because of aggressive government subsidies and a large drop in the global price of solar panels, are covering India’s northwestern plains — including this village of 2,000 people — with gleaming solar panels. So far, India uses only about 140 megawatts, including 10 megawatts used by the Azure installation, which can provide enough power to serve a town of 50,000 people, according to the company. But analysts say that the national 20,000 megawatt goal is achievable and that India could reach those numbers even a few years before 2020.

“Prices came down and suddenly things were possible that didn’t seem possible,” said Tobias Engelmeier, managing director of Bridge to India, a research and consulting firm based in New Delhi. Chinese manufacturers like Suntech Power and Yingli Green Energy helped drive the drop in solar panel costs. The firms increased production of the panels and cut costs this year by about 30 percent to 40 percent, to less than $1 a watt.

Developers of solar farms in India, however, have shown a preference for the more advanced, so-called thin-film solar cells offered by suppliers in the United States, Taiwan and Europe. The leading American provider to India is First Solar, based in Tempe, Ariz.

India does not have a large solar manufacturing industry, but is trying to develop one and China is showing a new interest in India’s growing demand. China’s Suntech Power sold the panels used at the Azure installation, which opened in June.

Industry executives credit government policies with India’s solar boom, unusual praise because businesses usually deride Indian regulations as Kafkaesque.

Over the last decade, India has opened the state-dominated power-generating industry to private players, while leaving distribution and rate-setting largely in government hands. European countries heavily subsidize solar power by agreeing to buy it for decades at a time, but the subsidies in India are lower and solar operators are forced into to greater competition, helping push down costs.

This month, the government held its second auction to determine the price at which its state-owned power trading company — NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam — would buy solar-generated electricity for the national grid. The average winning bid was 8.77 rupees (16.5 cents) per kilowatt hour.

That is about twice the price of coal-generated power, but it was about 27 percent lower than the winning bids at the auction held a year ago. Germany, the world’s biggest solar-power user, pays about 17.94 euro cents (23 American cents) per kilowatt hour.

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senthilkumark said:

Hi guys,
I have noticed empty spaces between wind mills. Is it possible to utilize that space to place solar panels, so that the project would become a hybrid source of power. Is there any technical problem in doing this?

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Should trade wars and protecting local jobs get in the way of clean energy?

That's the dilemma before India – and the world – at the moment. Desperately short of power, but with an average of 300 sunny days a year, India is aggressively pursuing solar energy. Its national solar programme, the grandly named Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (named after India's first prime minister) plans to generate 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022. But an ugly trade spat with the US may frustrate India's efforts to go solar.

In February this year, the US asked the World Trade Organisation for dispute consultations concerning the "domestic content" requirement of the solar programme. Domestic content is a loaded phrase in international trade. What it means is that India requires solar energy producers to use locally manufactured solar cells, and offers them special subsidies. This allegedly violates WTO principles that require countries to treat both foreign and domestic goods equally.

This isn't India's first move to protect local companies. In November 2012, India began anti-dumping investigations against Chinese, Malaysian, and US firms, following complaints by Indian manufacturers of solar cells that cheap Chinese imports were hurting their business. US and Chinese imports can be brought into the country tax-free, but Indian manufacturers have to pay duties on raw materials to make the same products.

H.R Gupta, chairman of Indosolar, one of the companies that filed the complaint, says: "Local manufacturers are not getting any business, and the solar industry is doing very poorly because of lack of orders." Many local manufacturers have stopped production, or are operating at far below normal capacity. In a press conference last week, the Indian Solar Manufacturer's Association flayed lack of support by the government.

But it isn't just Indian companies that are worried. Twelve influential green organisations, including the Sierra Club, Greenpeace USA, Action Aid USA and Friends of the Earth, have urged the US to withdraw the complaint, and called for a compromise that allows India to build a solar economy. In a strongly worded letter, the groups pointed out that India's domestic solar industry is critical to global efforts to tackle climate change. The groups also expressed dismay at the idea that climate policy might be determined by trade wars rather than climate science.

Things got worse. The 60-day consultation ended on 7 April, and with no sign of a compromise, the US may now ask the WTO to resolve the complaint. India, meanwhile, is not taking things lying down. On 17 April, it retaliated by asking the US to justify trade restrictions in its own renewable energy projects, arguing that incentives offered to U.S. companies to use local labour make it equally difficult for Indian companies to enter the US.

In this tit-for-tat game, what's certain is that the environment will be the loser. The Obama Administration is committed to strengthening the American clean energy sector and preserving the millions of jobs it supports," said US trade representative Ron Kirk in a statement back in February. A fine sentiment, except when jobs come up against lives. India currently burns a phenomenal amount of coal, which kills tens of thousands prematurely every year. With no viable alternative energy sources, more coal plants are on their way.

But forget India for a moment. Can climate change worldwide be resisted, as long as India continues to burn coal at this pace? Unlikely. As green groups have pointed out, behemoths such as India and China need to have every tool at their disposal to make the difficult shift to clean energy. The globe is teetering on the brink. Block India's fledgling solar industry and you may just push the country over, and take the rest of the world with you.

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Will India become a green superpower?

One of the world’s most polluting countries is investing heavily in clean tech

www.economist.com

It gets almost three-quarters of its electricity from coal, and has 39 new coal-fired power plants under construction. It digs up and burns more of the stuff than any other country except China. And it is coal’s loudest advocate internationally: at last year’s climate conference in Glasgow, it was the skunk at the garden party, blocking efforts to phase out the fuel most responsible for global warming.

This soot-smeared intransigence, however, distracts from a dramatic countervailing trend. While his underlings defended coal, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, made a series of pledges in Glasgow that, if kept, will make his country a green-energy powerhouse. The most eye-catching was the promise that India would achieve “net-zero” emissions of greenhouse gases (ghgs) by 2070—meaning that any emissions that had not been eliminated by then would be offset in some way.

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