To sit with elders of the gentle race, This world has seldom seen They talk of days for which they sit and wait and all will be revealed — “Kashmir” by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, 1974 We don’t see much about India in the media. On the world’s stage China is front and center. India, like China, has endeavored to be a leader of the world. India, like China, has problems: poverty, large population, environmental compromise. China is second to the United States in Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. China has only 8 percent more population than India but three times the land mass, a large portion of which is desert. China’s population growth rate is declining while India’s is rising. In less than 10 years, India’s population will exceed that of China. China has 100 percent access to electricity while India has under 80 percent. Conversely India is heavily reliant on coal to produce electricity and continues to import more, while China is quickly reversing its use of coal to natural gas. Just a few weeks ago, Russia completed the gas pipeline to China that is predicted to supply over 50% of China’s energy needs. India does not have this kind of access. The continent of Africa is India’s closest repository of energy assets it needs. Water is the weak link for both countries. India has to chose renewable in solar and wind for that reason, as all other energy technologies require water. India has a plan India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy provides data regarding the progress in the non-conventional energy sector. India must import about 35 percent of its energy needs and simply does not have the energy reserves that other nations do. Even if it had the resources, it would be unable to provide the water necessary to mine these resources. India also lacks the delivery system for natural gas. According to “India Times,” 89% of all households use bottled liquid petroleum gas, or LPG. To give you an idea of the shear number of bottles used, if stacked end to end, they would exceed the length of India’s 75,000-mile railroads by almost 19,000 miles! This also indicates a rather large infrastructure issue, aka where are the gas pipelines? Biomass makes up the rest of the heating for households. A large portion of this biomass is the dried portions of organically reprocessed food of cows. This reprocessed mass is then collected, dried and repurposed for heating and cooking. As a grateful American, I would like to point out that this is a practice unfamiliar in the U.S. The coal mined in India required the decimation of a significant portion of the forested land in India. This required the burning of vast tracks of land and the removal of an indigenous tribe. Where have I heard this before? If India is to aspire to world prominence, it will have to import much more than its current 35%. The plan, however, is to add 175 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2025. This will be primarily solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear.* This is indeed a challenge, or as perhaps Dickens may have dubbed it, a great expectation. India faces many obstacles namely meeting the projected budgets with tariffs expected on solar panels not presumed prior to the commitment. The country has done much in the way of offshore wind farms. The problem here becomes one of getting the energy from its source to where it’s needed efficiently. *I have a difficult time relaying that nuclear fuel now falls under the category of “renewable energy” sources. It’s a stretch for sure. Renewable energy classification is becoming a legal terminology, hence a circle is about to be squared as phraseology meets marketing. Renewable energy is now being defined as an energy source that can be repurposed or renewed after its initial use or is in constant supply — i.e. the sun and the wind. It is being argued that U-235 — the current nuclear fuel used in U.S. reactors — is renewable. Nuclear power is looking to make a comeback. Maybe this whole topic needs to be addressed in a future columns. The infrastructure India’s densely populated area coupled with its limited land area also posits another issue: the infrastructure. How will the energy get where it is needed? India’s roads are about as crowded as one could image and then some. Its highway system goes back almost 5,000 years. It was imperative then to develop connections from one major city to another. In 1990 India undertook a major highway development that rivaled the U.S. It is now second only to the U.S. in road mileage, but keep in mind India has five times the population of the U.S. Now, however, India has to take this one more giant step to deliver water, food, and fuel to everyone. The aforementioned example of the numerous bottles of LPG is indicative of my concern not only of a fuel transport issue but also of a safety concern. Delivering energy has its issues no matter how much resource is available, for several reasons. There are intrinsic losses. In America, 6 percent of our electricity is lost by the time it gets to your service entrance. The further the distance the greater the losses. This is problematic more so for India. For example, in this case, how much energy is expended transporting the 384 million canisters of the aforementioned LGP for refilling? How much electricity is lost over the power lines from the ocean wind turbines? The wind turbines in India are far from the main cities. In fact, some whole cities were created so to be close to these turbines to utilize the energy more efficiently. Adding to the problem: How much energy is lost in transit from distant solar farms? Without roofs, solar panels are more likely to be installed in “solar farms” as opposed to being mounted on roof tops. This creates two problems: long transmission lines and the amount of area needed to mount these solar panels in a country where space is at a premium. In my very humble opinion all solar panels should be mounted wherever possible on all available south-facing roofs first before building solar farms. What about nuclear power? It can be built wherever there is access to water and takes much, much less area. This reduces the aforementioned issues of land use and transmission distance substantially. Five nuclear plants are currently under construction and 18 are slated for completion by 2025. GE, which is currently holding on by a thread, and Westinghouse, which already closed its doors, are or were the two largest builders of nuclear power reactor and turbines. These were the majority manufacturers of reactors and turbines for the early nuclear industry. Now this colossal business failure, opens the door for the Russian reactors. Their history is spotty at best. Their NRC is nothing like our NRC. In conclusion India wants to move ahead in energy production. It has a plan. The plan makes sense. The plan is necessary. However India must overcome the added unexpected costs and overcome the logistics that other countries don’t have, which is a lack of infrastructure and space. India has the will and it has the talent. It has had a valued math culture long before the first writing of the Hebrew scripture. Will India pull off the near impossible for the good of all? I guess we can sit and wait and all will be revealed.
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AuthorJames Bobreski is a process control engineer who has been in the field of electric power production for 43 years. His “Alternate Energy” column runs monthly. Archives
February 2020
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