A look at India’s energy availability and security imperatives | By Rajabahadur V Arcot
With energy playing an important role in almost all our economic and day-to-day activities, such as food production, health-care systems, water distribution, transportation, and communication, access to energy is critical for achieving the country’s sustainable economic growth. From a financial perspective too, it is imperative for India to focus on energy conservation measures for vigorously developing alternate renewable sources of energy. With India depending on imported crude to the extent of almost 80% to meet its requirements, oil imports account for more than half of the country’s trade deficit. The continued excessive dependence on imported oil is economically unsustainable.
How vulnerable the country is can be gauged from the fact that India’ per capita consumption of energy is still less than a quarter of the level of China’s energy use and yet the country is energy deficit. Due to this deficiency, industrial production and quality of life suffer. This is despite the fact that the country is the world’s fifth largest power producer. Measures aimed at energy conservation and transmission loss prevention can have a significant impact on the current situation.
In my opinion, we need to pay greater attention to energy conservation and electric power generation from renewable energy sources as they call for a radical change in our approach to energy availability and its security.
While pursuing the trodden path of power generation using traditional fuels, such as fossil-fired power plants and alternate sources such as nuclear power plants, India must increase its reliance on renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, bagasse, biomass, and others. India finds itself fortunately placed in having abundance of solar energy and significant amount of wind and other renewables.
One of the arguments against aggressively pursuing renewable energy opportunities is its higher cost compared to conventional power from fossil fuels. If we compare it with the price that our country pays because of non-availability of power to almost a third of the country’s population, we would realise that the argument is fallacious. In addition, with increased exploitation of renewable energy sources, the costs, especially solar power, are dramatically declining and even as of now the costs are comparable to the electric power from diesel generation, a fuel which is highly subsidised, import dependent, and not environment friendly. Additionally, investments in renewable energy would help us to meet our country’s commitment and obligations to the international community to reduce emissions. Above all, in the long-term, we all will be forced to embrace carbon neutral / net zero carbon footprints. Yet other important reasons to build renewable energy based generating plants are that they are scalable and can be built quickly even in remote places to meet the local demands. Compared to the total cost of setting up large centrally generated power, be it fossil or nuclear power, the cost of setting up small renewal energy based generating plants and connecting them through microgrid is cost effective with quick payback.
While, India has taken several initiatives to increase the share of electric power generation from solar, wind, and other renewable sources, such as bagasse based cogeneration plants, policy makers need to get their acts together to generate the necessary momentum. The electric power industry’s roadmap must be to leapfrog and embrace the path of distributed generation and energy management. Globally, the trend is to take the path of smart grid and
India’s electric power industry would benefit immensely by adopting the micro grid supported distributed generation as its future roadmap. Ensuring availability of electric power to essential services in the case of cyber-attack on critical electric power industry also calls for developing distributed generation and transmission architecture.