Daily Archives: June 4, 2007

Decentralized Energy in India

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India with a population of almost 1.2 billion people is growing its energy needs every day. Concern all over the world is the effect of this on carbon emissions. Rightly, the Indian concern is to provide electricity to the almost 600 million people still not connected to the electricity grid. But how can India do this without following the traditional greenhouse intensive model? What is the current state in the Indian electricity generation system?

Electricity is a given in most developed countries however, in countries like India it is a scarce commodity. For individuals it provides discomfort and decreases productivity and creates constraints in their daily life.

The Mint reports that with the summer temperatures nearing 40 degrees centigrade there is more demand for electricity however; “The fear of power cuts soars when sweltering summer heat arrives in India, spurring demand for generators as electricity-starved residents increasingly produce their own power.Except for VIPs in official bungalows, everyone from stall-holders to former ambassadors are hit by the power outages, and those who can afford it are increasingly making alternative arrangements.”

So what is the alternative in Indian cities and villages?

One such is the diesel generator.

As the IHT reports:

So for now, diesel generators remain the favorite choice of millions across the developing world — so much so that the International Energy Agency plans to assess the extent of their use as part of a detailed look next year at energy use in India and China.

Businesses are not exempt from this tyranny. A recent NyTimes article explains the troubles faced by the TCS; India’s largest IT & Outsourcing company.

Look up at the tops of buildings, and on any given day, you are likely to find three, four or six smokestacks poking out of each, blowing gray-black plumes into the clouds. If the smokestacks are being used, it means the power is off and the building–whether bright new mall, condominium or office–is probably being powered by diesel-fed generators.

This being India, a country of more than one billion people, the scale is staggering. In just one case, Tata Consultancy Services, a technology company, maintains five giant generators, along with a nearly 5,300-gallon tank of diesel fuel underground, as if it were a gasoline station.

The IHT article reports that “Big conventional power plants, even those that burn coal, are often cleaner, safer and more efficient than crude household stoves and other small systems. So many economists say that the first step in developing countries still needs to be the construction of power lines connecting as many villagers to national grids as possible.”

With increasing personal power production in India, even Coal powered plants beat the clean power index. The government has been improving the emission standards of diesel generators and there are now some estimates on how many of these are in the country and the pollution problems that they are creating.

Some other alternatives in India are “Burning wood, kerosene lamps, burning cow dung, twigs & leaves, invertors (powered by batteries) and diesel generators. All of these alternative solutions cost more, pollute more and are less efficient then the coal powered grid alternatives.”

What needs to be done is clearly is the extension of the national grid across India, improving the efficiency of generation, capping the losses in transmission and changing the politics of free power.

The next step should be the new age personal power production options like solar power, micro wind power, biomass generators, smart grids, and other alternatives. There is an increasing case for the decentralization of energy and India needs to look at these options.

Like many other cases, India has the option to leap-frog the conventional technology and move to smarter solutions in power generation which is better for the country and the world. The biggest question is the politics.

Geoff Wells

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In my quest to understand Sustainability and its linkage to business; Geoff Wells has been playing thGeoff Wellse role of a mentor to me for the past year. Geoff Wells is currently the Joint Managing Director of Imperative Plus Pty Ltd and a Adjunct Professor at the International Graduate School of Business in Adelaide where I studied my MBA.

Geoff has been blogging  for a few months now. If you are interested in sustainability and business and want to understand from a leading thinker in the field, look no further.

Check out his blog here.

Deals that can save you the Earth

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With the Howard government releasing a emissions task force report on the next steps for Australia embarking on a carbon trading regime, there are tons of articles on this in the Australian newspapers. My link log provides some of the good ones.

This Brisbane Times article discusses how Carbon trading may work.

For every coffee, muffin or bottle of water sold by Antonino Iaccarino at his North Sydney cafe, E Vero, a few cents goes to fund an energy efficiency project somewhere else in the city.

Iaccarino, who sub-leases in a large office building, can do little to cut his greenhouse gas emissions because he cannot change the source of electricity powering his business.

Instead, he is doing his bit for the environment by proxy. Or at least, his customers are. Iaccarino gives the money he raises from his environmental levy to one of the many companies setting up in the business of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The Carbon Reduction Institute uses funds raised by businesses such as E Vero to buy and install compact florescent lightbulbs in buildings that use a lot of electrical lighting, such as hotels. The deal is priced to cover the lightbulbs, their installation, and a little extra for the institute.

The cut in greenhouse gas emissions achieved by the new lightbulbs is recognised by the NSW Government in the form of carbon certificates. Those certificates, or credits, are worth money.

In exchange for the energy-efficient light bulbs, the hotel signs away its carbon credits to the institute.

The cafe is now “carbon neutral”, the hotel has cut its electricity bill and the institute has made a tidy profit.

Welcome to the brave new world of carbon trading, a commodity market that could one day be the world’s biggest. This is the market that promises to plant the trees, cap landfill gases, or improve energy efficiency in developing countries to neutralise the pollution emitted by our cars, our homes and our plane travel. It’s also the market that will constrain the ability of power plants and heavy industry to pollute.

There are carbon brokers, carbon trading exchanges, even carbon futures. The world’s big banks are all setting up carbon trading desks and fund managers are providing finance for projects that cut emissions. Citibank alone this year committed $US50 billion to environmental projects.

An entire support industry has arisen to service these carbon traders; lawyers to write carbon contracts, experts to verify emissions cuts have taken place and accountants to audit carbon inventories.

Molitor, the former director of climate change services at PricewaterhouseCoopers, estimates that 600 billion tonnes of carbon emissions projected to be emitted over the next 43 years will have to be avoided to stabilise the climate.

If you price carbon at $US25 a tonne (seen by many as the minimum needed to direct investment away from polluting sources of energy and towards cleaner sources) you have a capital-market opportunity of $US15 trillion, he says.

“This would be the largest global financial market opportunity in history. The question Australia needs to answer is: how much of that $15 trillion is coming our way?”

One interesting bit from the article is the estimation Molitor provides on the possible size of the global carbon market. This is the first time I have seen somebody put a number on this. It clearly shows the reason why Investment banks are gearing up to the new commodity on the market. And as highlighted above, an entire new industry is coming up providing new jobs in many different roles.

Invest in Maldives, fight climate change: Gayoom

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The Manglorean times reports:

Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom Sunday called for global action to combat climate change that directly impacts low-lying countries and sought more global investment to spur his country to achieve the transition to a middle-income liberal democracy.”There is no alternative but for the whole world to fight climate change. The Maldives on its part is doing what it can, but that would never be enough. Action on a global scale is a must,” Gayoom told delegates participating in the second Maldives Partnership Forum (MPF) here.

“Our focus has been on alerting the international community to the dangers that climate change and its devastating effects, including sea level rise, pose to the Maldives, and to the other low-lying countries and regions,” Gayoom stressed.

“Investing in the Maldives is about investing in growth, in the future, in ensuring environmental sustainability. It is about investing for the benefit of an entire nation,” he said.

A long-haul to a sustainable world economy

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Keith Hudson from Bath, England in his daily newsletter commenting on the recent article in the New Scientist by David Cohen, “We are using up minerals at an alarming rate. How long before
they run out?”

Careful studies by several academic teams around the world suggest that several critical materials needed by the modern electronic age are already in short supply. Key resources that are almost at vanishing point already are Gallium, Germanium and Rhodium. Other crucial materials and their anticipated lifetimes are as follows: Antimony (15 – 20 years)
Hafnium (about 10 years), Indium (5 – 10 years), Platinum (about 15 years), Silver (15 – 2-0 years), Tantalum (20 – 30 years), Uranium (30 -40 years), Zinc (20 – 30 years)

Thus the irony is that the new, “post-industrial” electronic age is even more vulnerable to key resource shortages than the more old-fashioned, industrial, “metal-bashing” technologies ever were. For example, there seems to be no way that computerisation can grow as intensively in the future as it has in the past because of shortages of critical materials such as germanium. Nuclear power seems stymied by shortages of uranium. As to widespread solar technology by means of solar cells and electronic circuitry changing sunlight into electricity this will be stillborn.

Whether one is considering countries which are trying to industrialise, or those developed countries which are fast changing to an electronic-based service economy, any sensible person reading the full article in the current New Scientist (“Earth Audit”) cannot fail to be convinced that not only our present way of life (for the fortunate one-third) nor the contemplated future life (for all) is at all possible without a fantastic reduction in world population and a new, and totally different, way of life.

There remains just one more possibility. This will comprise the bacterial production of hydrogen (for direct propulsion and also electricity generation) and also organic variants of consumer products which presently rely on metals and other energy-intensive materials. This will be done by technologies supervised by DNA — the most sophisticated control technology ever discovered. We only need to cite spider silk which is stronger than steel or the still-remaining versatility of wood or the still-superior uses of natural fibres for clothes to prove our case. There is almost nothing presently made that cannot also be made by organic methods — and could perform just as well — as is now made by “modern” energy-intensive technologies.