India Needs Renewable Energy

The economic advancement of a nation is monitored on the basis of the energy produced and consumed by their country. Although, it is not a perfect measure today, it’s being used as a convention worldwide since long.

Although, all forms of energy are convertible, while talking about energy, we mainly talk about electricity. Electricity may be generated in different ways.

We use energy to carry out many different functions. For example – lighting, running machines, heating, cleaning, freezing, cutting and so on.

India is an energy starved country.  Also it is one of the most polluted countries in the world. With the rapid growth of industry here, the demand of energy is increasing very rapidly.

Most of the power generation in this country is based on the coal-fired thermal power plants, however, our coal deposit is also almost depleted.

Under such circumstances, Indian energy experts and scientists have to specially focus on the renewable sources of energy.

Although our former government made a plan to provide “Power for All by 2012”, there is hardly any remarkable development in this direction, owing to several factors.

One major difficulty with electricity is – once generated at a place, it cannot be transmitted to a very long distance without significant amount of loss.

Thus, transporting fuel to the spot of power production involves a huge cost. Secondly, coal washing and disposal of the fly ash also multiply pollution problems.       

Renewable sources of energy refer to the sources, which naturally occurs again and again after a certain interval of time. For example, the sun appears on the sky everyday, the wind blows (at high speed) daily for a few hours, the high tide occurs for a certain period everyday and so on. All these can be the sources for renewable energy.

The major difference between the conventional source and the renewable source of energy is – while using the renewable source, the source is not exhausted. But while using the conventional source, gradually the source is drained.

Most of the conventional sources of energy, when exploited for producing electricity, generate tremendous amount of heat and excessive amount of pollution.

Thus, thermal power plants are one of the major sources of pollution worldwide. In most of the foreign countries, they use washed coal, which is free from other pollutants. But in India, still at many places, we use unwashed coal to reduce the raw material cost. This manifolds the pollution problem in our country.

India has a tremendous potential for generating wind energy.  At present around 20% of the total potential has been harnessed.

Mainly the wind power stations are located in Tamilnadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala. However, these days, almost all state governments are giving special importance to harnessing wind energy.

It is expected that in another 10 years time, at least 25-30% of our country’s total energy requirement will be catered through wind energy.

Wind energy does not produce any kind of pollution. However, some people argue that it kills or disturbs birds.

Solar energy is a totally clean form of energy that India can harness. India is blessed by nature to have a very wide span of land which almost throughout the year receives sunlight.

However, our scientists are facing a few difficulties, which are hampering the fast growth.

Solar cells are used to generate solar energy. These cells contain silicon. Due to fast growth of the Information Technology sector, most of the silicons are purchased by the IT product manufacturers, even at a higher price. So, the silicon producers are not much interested in catering to the solar cell manufacturers. Thus, the price of the solar cells are still very high – out of the rich of the common people.

Secondly, India being a tropical country, here we find tremendous amount of dust in the atmosphere, which reduces the efficiency of the solar cells.

Although, solar energy at a mass scale everywhere is yet a dream in our country, small solar modules – such as Solar Lanterns are available, at a highly subsidized price. Even solar fans are found in Indian markets.

Tidal energy harnessing has been started in India. However, it will take a long time for us to generate it at a commercial level. Its maintenance cost is very high, and secondly here again comes up the question of transmission cost.

Geo-thermal energy is yet another source of energy. But here too, we have to carry out further research, to make it economically viable.

Thus, Indian politicos are supposed to focus stringently on harnessing renewable energy, although any renewable energy project is less expensive and less time consuming, they can be made commercially viable even at low scale. Will they???