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Suprita Anupam

Subeditor

Clean India Journal

Let's Step Up To The Challenge

With big PPP investments, power projects seem to be soaring; but will these be able to change the Indian power scenario? Will it fulfil country’s infrastructure and common man’s requirement?  Amidst of recent cry over lowering the electricity rate, almost all the major private power firms have indicated a near future hike in the electricity rates owing to the rising coal prices. So far, the intention was to improve the capacity to fulfil the per capita demand.  With 224 GW installed capacity, India is counted as having fifth largest power capacity in the world, but recent power failures show the other side of the coin. Installed capacity doesn’t fulfil country’s power demand but the actual supply does. 

Low Reliability and Efficiency of Coal Plants

57% of Installed power capacity come from coal-fired plants and more than two-third of these does generate half of their capacity owing to the coal shortage. Nuclear power plants are also going through the same fate. One-third of the total units of power plants hasn’t seen the sunrise. Inefficiency and poor air-filtration techniques are the other two objectives never intended to achieve. An air research firm counts that pollution from coal power plants causes up to 115,000 premature deaths in India every year, with an associated cost of $3.3 to $4.6 billion.

  

Clumsy policies, poor management and vague environmental concerns are often counted as major drawbacks behind the poor show by Indian power plants.

Cleantech Boost

In spite of the unavailability of funding, India has shown tremendous commitment towards the adoption of renewable source of energy. The renewable power plants constitute 12.45% of the total installed capacity. Generating power with approx 87% efficiency, renewable power plants score over all the three major drawbacks of coal-fired plants – Coal shortage, Inefficiency and pollution.  

Need Essential Active Involvements

Some states such as Tamilnadu have stepped up to encourage the use of solar power with an aim of generating close to 3000 MW by 2015, making mandatory for heavy consumers of electricity like industrial units to draw 3 percent of its power requirements from solar energy by December 2013 and 6 % from Jan 2014. But Industry reactions are cold. According to Ramesh, President, AIEMA & MD, Airflow Engineering, “1 MW of solar power generation needs at least 3-4 acres of land that means to generate 3000 MW solar power there’s need to acquire 9000-11000 acres of land. Keeping the current shortage of land, it seems very difficult to achieve the same.”

To make the dream ‘Power for all’ true, government will have to play an active role than making clumsy policies, lead from the front to solve land acquisition and environmental concerns. Renewable energy technology too are improving @ fast pace and with the installation of the latest Cleantechs such as Next Generation LWRs, Flying wind power plants with WindSENSE technology, E-CAT (energy catelizer) Nobel gas fuel adoption and zero energy building development can out pace the gap between energy needs and energy availability.