Dialogue January-March

India may be on the brink of an energy famine. Solar power used in conjunction with existing power plants and the proposed river linking network can lead to an energy revolution that can double India’s energy production. States like Karnataka that are rich in hydroelectric are particularly well situated to take advantage of the solar potential.

If present trends continue, India may soon find itself in the grip of energy famine. Its economic consequences are obvious, but what is not sufficiently appreciated by the rulers and administrators is its potential for social and political turmoil. To see what it can be like, one has only to look across the border in neighbouring Pakistan. It has received curiously little attention in the Indian media, but it is worth a look since if unattended India may find itself in a similar situation.

Power shortages are hardly unknown in India, even in the national capital though it has not yet attained the virulence that it has in Pakistan where it is disrupting both the economy and the social structure. There are energy riots (like food riots) and businesses are closing due to lack of power. There are ‘energy refugees’ from the villages that are roaming the streets of cities like Peshawar and Lahore adding to their already overburdened infrastructure. The Indian media, living in the comfort of cities like Delhi, with diesel generators running full blast have failed to report on these developments. One is forced to look to foreign media to get a picture of the energy famine plaguing Pakistan. The Washington Post recently reported:

* Dr. Navaratna Rajaram began his career with Tata Power Company and went on to spend over twenty years in the U.S. academia and high technology industry including NASA. He is now an independent researcher based in Bangalore, India and Boston, U.S.A.

“In the militant-infested northwestern city of Peshawar, hundreds of businessmen recently marched in a mock funeral procession — but not to protest bombings or kidnappings. The ‘corpse’ they carried was an electric meter… In other areas of the country, shopkeepers have threatened mass suicide to protest 18 to 20 hours of power blackouts every day. Mobs are descending on utility offices to destroy records and meters, and they have attacked political parties’ headquarters during riots that sometimes turn deadly.”

Such 18 to 20 hour power shutdowns are not unknown in rural India either, but in Pakistan this is compounded by mismanagement which has made it assume serious proportions. In May this year, the Pakistan Government defaulted on its payments for failing to reimburse millions to independent power providers — more proof that, after years of mismanagement and neglect, the nation’s energy sector is in extremis. These independent providers mainly use highly expensive diesel sets for generation which the Government cannot afford to pay for.

As a result of all this, some experts are now suggesting that the power crisis is more of a threat to Pakistan’s stability than terrorism. Whether this is true or not, there is no denying that power shortages are taking a heavy toll on the economy. Load shedding averages 5 to 10 hours a day in some urban areas and more than double that in rural areas. The shutdowns paralyze commerce, stoke inflation and unemployment, and further enrage a restive populace. According to the Washington Post report:

“ …‘We have been shattered by these problems, and the government is responsible,’ said Muhammad Naeem, sitting in the darkened office of the marble and granite company he runs in Islamabad. Persistent outages have forced him to cut shifts by half and reduce his payroll from 35 people to eight as production has fallen off, he said.”

As in India, businesses and factories use backup generators if they have them, but businessmen say the rising cost of fuel to run the machines hurts their bottom line. Also like India, Pakistan has to import the diesel to run its generators. But soon a point will be reached when the extra money to pay for the increasing cost of fuel will simply not be there. India must see the situation in Pakistan as a warning of what can happen in the not too distant future if nothing is done.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. With proper political vision and leadership an energy revolution exploiting solar can make India an energy abundant country just as the Green Revolution and the White Revolution made India food abundant and milk abundant. But this will call for vision beginning with the recognition that while India is poor in fossil fuels, it is extremely rich in solar.

Fifty years ago it was widely believed that India would never be able to feed its people and mass starvation was something the country had to live with. In fact, in 1961 India was on the brink of mass famine. M.S. Swaminathan, then advisor to the Indian government recognized that ad-hoc solutions like increased grain imports would not do, and a permanent solution had to be found to India’s chronic grain shortage. Seeking drastic improvements in India’s agricultural production, the Government, with the collaboration of the Ford Foundation started a pilot project in Punjab to demonstrate that higher yields were possible using special varieties of wheat with better agricultural practices.

The experiment was soon extended to rice by adapting IR8— a variety of semi-dwarf rice developed by the International Rice Research Institute in Philippines. By 1968, Indian agronomist S.K. De Datta had shown that by combining the IR8 seeds with proper use of fertilizers and appropriate irrigation methods, it was possible to more than double the yield per acre. From a near famine situation in 1961, India by 2006 had become one of the world’s largest rice exporters shipping 4.5m. tons in that year alone. This is now hailed as the Green Revolution.

In energy production, India stands today where it stood with regard to food grains production in 1961. Most cities face scheduled and unscheduled power outages while in rural areas, one would be lucky to receive even a few hours of electricity a day. Luxury apartments invariably include diesel power generators to deal with power outages. They burn diesel inefficiently and pollute the atmosphere. As demand for electricity increases, more fossil fuels like coal and oil get burnt putting a strain on India’s limited coal supplies and adding to the oil import bill.

Politicians and the media can afford to ignore the power crises only because they live in luxurious isolation from the suffering public. One has only to visit small towns and villages to see the real situation. What the situation demands is an energy revolution on the scale of the Green Revolution and the White Revolution. Thanks to science this is now possible. Advances in solar power technology and the ready availability of inexpensive solar cells have made it possible to think of doubling the generating capacity of many existing power plants, especially hydroelectric plants.

The first point to note is that while India is poor in fossil fuel resources, it is extremely rich in solar, more so than any other country of comparable size including the U.S. and even China. The problem is not lack of supply— for the sun delivers many times more energy than we need or we can use, but its conversion into usable electricity. Scientists have calculated that 5000 trillion kWh energy is available over India’s land area per year, with most parts receiving from four to seven kWh per sq meter per day.

There are two ways to look at this: any solar plant only requires an area that receives sunlight; as a corollary, any area that receives sunlight but is not being used for solar power generation is wasting solar energy. Worse, this energy is heating living areas that now require cooling by energy consuming equipment like coolers and air conditioners.

The science behind solar power is well understood. As far back as 1887 Heinrich Hertz noticed that sunlight falling on some materials like selenium gave rise to an electric current in its circuit. It remained a puzzle until Albert Einstein in 1905 explained it on the basis of the newly formulated quantum idea of Max Planck. In his paper Einstein proposed the simple description of “light quanta”, or photons, and showed how they explained such phenomena as the photoelectric effect. In other words, he showed that the energy output depends on the frequency. This was to have profound consequences for physics by showing that light has a dual nature— acting as wave as well as particle. But for our purposes here it is sufficient to know that he launched what may soon become the solar revolution.

The heart of a solar plant is the solar cell or the photovoltaic cell. Unlike the familiar lead acid battery which is an electrochemical device, the photovoltaic cell is a solid state electrical device that converts light energy directly into electricity. The photovoltaic effect is related to the photoelectric but not the same. In the photoelectric effect electrons are emitted from the surface when exposed to light. In the photovoltaic effect electrons are not just emitted but transferred between different bands within the material.

This transfer of electrons between bands leads to the buildup of a potential difference (voltage) between the two electrodes. Assemblies of solar cells are used to make solar modules which can convert energy from sunlight. Multiple modules are assembled together in such a way as to lie within a single geometric configuration (like a plane) to create a solar panel. A solar panel is essentially a power plant that uses sunlight as fuel. It is more properly called a solar power plant. A solar power plant installed in conjunction with a hydro power plant can double its generating capacity as well save the precious water stored in its reservoir. Here is how.

Every hydroelectric plant has a large reservoir storing water to drive its turbines. The reservoir covers hundreds and even thousands of acres of land that receives abundant sunshine. This sunlight can be tapped to supplement the generating capacity of the power plant. Solar panels mounted on the reservoir would convert sunlight into electricity and feed into the same power grid as the hydro generators.

This means the generators would not be drawing any water from the reservoirs when sunlight is adequate for solar panels to feed the grid. Thus the water stored in the reservoir would last much longer. This calls for the installation of solar panels, possibly floating, on the surface of the reservoir. These would not only feed the grid and make the stored water last longer, but also reduce evaporation by acting as a shield. Karnataka with its abundant hydroelectric resources is especially well suited to reap the benefits of solar.

Solar power technology has reached the point that it is viable on a commercial scale. A solar plant can be installed anywhere the Sun shines— on land or on water. Any vacant area on which the Sun shines that is not being used for solar power generation can be seen as wasted space. This has given rise to the concept of harvesting solar energy by turning agriculturally unproductive land into ‘solar farms’. The practice is becoming particularly popular in the Western United States where the land is poor but sunlight is abundant (though not as abundant as in India).

India has little choice but go solar on a large scale. The U.S. experience suggests that with currently available technology, solar panels can convert about 15 percent of the Sun’s energy into usable electricity. This comes to .60 to 1.05 kWh per square meter and has been achieved on a commercial basis in solar farms in the U.S. India should be able to do better because the light intensity is greater. Nonetheless, it gives us a quantitative figure that can be used to arrive at technical and economic estimates.

(Recent reports in the U.S. claim a spectacular 43 percent conversion but they are yet to make it into the field. Once that is achieved, solar power will be on its way to replacing fossil power altogether— in the same way semiconductor chips replaced vacuum tubes.)

The U.S. experience suggests that value added to otherwise unproductive land by solar plants can be one of the major incentives for land owners to turn to ‘solar farming’. The U.S. has vast tracts of desert and semi-desert land in states like Texas, California, Nevada, Arizona and others. Some land owners even in less arid areas like Ohio are beginning to switch from agriculture to solar farms. They are attracted by the prospect of a continuous income from a one-time capital investment with little or no annual expenditure. A solar farm installation company in California notes:

“Solar farming is the process of turning unused or underused land into an electricity production farm. Solar farming allows individuals with vacant or otherwise unusable land to make a very good return on investment. Imagine making 12% or more guaranteed return for 30 years with no out of pocket money and cash flow positive from day one.” Utilities (power companies) typically sign a 10 to 20 year power purchase contracts with solar farm operators. The going rate for PG&E, which supplies power to part of California, buys power from solar farm operators at $0.15 to $0.18 per kWh. At these rates a 5 acre parcel can generate about $300,000 profit per year.

The economics in India may be different but can easily be worked out. It is also worth noting that unlike in real estate development or setting up a manufacturing plant, a solar plant does not ‘consume’ the land: solar panels can be installed at a considerable height from the ground without interfering with ground level activities. For example, there is no technical reason why solar panels cannot be installed over a shopping mall which can continue to function as a shopping mall.

To exploit solar power on a large scale, a sophisticated grid will have to be set up at the state and eventually national level even while maintaining a high degree of decentralization. Here is where India’s previous experience with the milk grid combining local autonomy with a national grid using cooperatives can prove valuable. Tribhuvandas Patel who conceived India’s milk revolution recognized that milk unlike food grains cannot be stored over long periods and a network of cooperatives was the answer.

Like milk, solar (and wind) power also cannot be stored indefinitely. In hydroelectric plants, we store power in the form of water in reservoirs which we draw as required for running generators. Adding solar plants saves this water. But a power grid can function like the milk cooperative grid, matching supply and demand. The management of storage and distribution of solar power grid may prove a greater challenge than solar power generation. But thanks to what is happening in Gujarat, we may soon be able to learn how to do it.

In a bold initiative, the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has built and dedicated to the nation a solar power plant that has an installed capacity of 605MW in the solar park at Charanka village in Patan district of Gujarat. Of this total, 214MW of it is already operational making it the world’s largest photovoltaic plant. Spread over 3,000 acres in the dry, remote region of the State, it is a pointer to how agriculturally unproductive land can be made productive by ‘harvesting’ solar power. The Karnataka Government has announced a similar project in a village in the arid part of Bijapur district. This could be extended to other parts of the state also.

In India land is always in short supply though there is no shortage of agriculturally unproductive land that can be turned into productive solar farms. The Government in Gujarat has begun a project to use sections of the Narmada Canal for solar plants. A multi-purpose pilot project generating one megawatt of electricity from solar panels mounted above the Narmada branch canal was recently dedicated to the nation by Chief Minister Modi. This approach will spare valuable land that would otherwise be needed if the solar power project were land-based. In addition, panels, by acting as heat shield will save a huge quantity of water in the canals from evaporation.

This appears to be a unique innovation that has not been tried in the U.S. or anywhere else. It has considerable potential and can be used in irrigated and agriculturally productive areas where land cannot be spared for solar farms. This writer has suggested to the Karnataka government that the Vishweshwarayya canal in the Mysore and Mandya districts as well as several reservoirs in the area be converted into multi-purpose irrigation and solar projects. To begin with, ‘overhead solar farms’, as we may well call them, can be extended beyond canals to lakes and reservoirs also where the water loss due to evaporation is appreciably greater.

Viewing solar farming as a multi-purpose program can be made beneficial by extending it to the river linking project that has just been mandated by the Supreme Court. This will mean the joint development of a solar power grid to go with the national river grid. If undertaken, this could prove to be one of the largest public works programs in history, comparable in scale to the U.S. Interstate Highway program under President Dwight Eisenhower. The proposed solar-river linking project would eventually yield benefits in flood control, irrigation, river transportation and power generation.

India squandered a great opportunity to develop the necessary infrastructure by opting for a populist program like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guaranty Act (MNREGA), instead of a public works program like river linking which might have come in handy today. MNREGA is inspired by the 1960s era failed European welfare state idea. In India today as in Europe 50 years ago, it has created artificial labor shortages. Europe tried to overcome its labor shortages by importing workers from Third World countries leading to social and political tension.

On the other hand, a public works program of river linking with solar grid would generate employment at all levels including tourism and sports made possible by waterways, reservoirs and added power capacity. Further, unlike the ill-conceived MNREGA which has created labor shortages while being a huge drain on the economy, these would be productive jobs that would contribute to the national economy. The scientific, engineering and management experience acquired in the process would be of great value in future projects.

Both the technology and the methodology already exist to wean the country away from its excessive and ultimately infeasible dependence on fossil fuels. The science behind solar power is not new and constantly improving. What will be new is the design and implementation of a multipurpose grid of linked rivers and solar plants. This will call for political leadership and management talent of the highest order. India has no choice but meet the challenge; otherwise the future is bleak. Gujarat has already shown how it can be done.

Any planning for energy future must start with the realization— that while India is fossil poor it is solar rich. This is not a new revelation; it is something that has been known for over half a century. It should have been the centerpiece of India’s planning for the energy sector but political leaders went after glamorous gigantic project along with Soviet style centralized planning instead of encouraging business development at the grassroots level. India still has a planning commission that does little more than provide employment for high priced bureaucrats who love spending public money.

India has a huge domestic market. This should have been the focus of development fifty years ago, with support for businesses in the semiconductor industry, but the planners went after big ticket public sector projects. The mistake was repeated in the much more vital solar energy field; a combination of financial incentives and research support would have made India a leader in the field of solar power. China, placed in a similar situation took the decision to promote the solar industry with the result it is now the world’s largest supplier of cheap solar panels. This has resulted in a drop of nearly 75 percent in the cost of solar panels since 2008. India can at least take advantage of this as Gujarat has shown. What it needs is public leadership.

A fundamental problem in India is that the public space is dominated by politicians and self-styled ‘intellectuals’ rather than by scientists and problem solvers. It is fashionable for these to claim that they and their ideas can solve the nation’s problems, but it has never worked out that way. They gave the country the Planning Commission and a socialist economy. The former gave India extravagant bureaucrats squandering public funds, and the latter left India saddled with an inefficient public sector and a stagnant economy for over fifty years. They brought no improvements in life to India’s suffering population. On the other hand it created a vast bureaucracy with an obstructionist mentality that led to an exodus of India’s talent. This obstructionist nature of the entrenched bureaucracy (and politicians) will be to the greatest obstacle when India tries to go solar.

On the other hand, major advances in life quality in India (as elsewhere) have come from the vision and work based on scientific thinking. Agricultural scientists like S.K. De Dutta and Tribhuvandas Patel who conceived the idea of a national grid of milk cooperatives and went on to make India the world’s largest producer of milk and milk products. His idea and approach may prove helpful as India embarks on a solar power grid as it now has to.

Tribhuvandas’s insight was that milk is not storable over long periods and at the same time it is consumed almost immediately. He saw it as a challenge at both the supply- and the demand side of milk production and distribution. He saw early that what the situation demanded was a network of cooperatives or a grid to balance supply and demand of a perishable product. This insight and experience can prove valuable when a solar power grid ever becomes reality.

While Verghese Kurien is justly renowned for his contribution to the White Revolution, Tribhuvandas Patel is not as well known as he should be. He was from Anand in Gujarat, a village that he was destined to make internationally famous by founding Anand Milk Union Limited or AMUL. Founded in 1946 as a rural cooperative it has now grown into a $2.5 billion giant. While it lists only about 750 people in its marketing division as employees, it has a pool of more than 3 million independent milk producers as members.

During the Freedom Struggle, Tribhuvandas had served under Sardar Patel who helped him found the first rural cooperative in 1946. He was greatly influenced by Sardar Patel’s capacity to get things done by people under him. When the network of milk cooperative began to grow large he realized that it needed a person of professional management skills that he did not possess. In 1950, he brought in a brilliant young manager called Verghese Kurien (born 1921) to run AMUL. The rest is history.

Tribhuvandas’s contribution was recognized with the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1963. The Indian Government belatedly gave him a Padmabhushan the following year, only because the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation recognized him. The award seems inadequate given the magnitude of his contribution when people who have done far less have received higher awards. Also, his highly successful grassroots approach has not been studied in business schools while the suspect claims of politicians have been celebrated even at the Harvard Business School.

Untypically for an Indian leader, Tribhuvandas was not ambitious for position or personal glory. When he voluntarily retired from the chairmanship of AMUL, the people—not the Government—rewarded him with six lakh rupees representing one rupee contribution each from six lakh grateful members of the cooperatives he had helped to start. He used this fund to start a charitable trust, named the Tribhuvandas Foundation—an NGO to work on women and child health in his native Kheda district. He was its first Chairman. Characteristically, he handed over the chairmanship to Verghese Kurien when the organization started to grow rapidly, with funds increasingly coming from foreign sources.

While Verghese Kurien is justly renowned for his work, it is unfortunate that Tribhuvandas Patel, the real father of the White Revolution is all but forgotten. If we want a third revolution that can make India energy abundant, it needs practical visionaries like Tribhuvandas.

Tribuvandas Patel’s concept of a network of local cooperatives may serve as a useful model when solar plants begin to be set up, especially if done in conjunction with the proposed river network. This however addresses the supply side. On the demand side, the way solar is consumed will lead to changes in the way we live and work. Houses and workplaces will have to take advantage of cheap electricity produced from abundant solar while simultaneously shielding living areas from radiation. This was realized by the visionary designer Buckminster Fuller as far back as 1969.

Fuller was a multifaceted personality— scientist, engineer, architect and philosopher. But above all he was a visionary humanist. Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of “omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity.” Fuller referred to himself as “the property of universe” and during one radio interview he gave later in life, declared himself and his work “the property of all humanity”. For his lifetime of work, the American Humanist Association named him the 1969 Humanist of the Year. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

While Fuller held many patents he is best known as the developer of the Geodesic Dome— a self-supporting structure that can be extended to any size without limit. In the Montreal Expo he demonstrated how it could be used to heat the interior with sunlight and thereby reduce energy consumption. Being a tropical country, the problem in India is cooling. Now that inexpensive silicon-based photovoltaic panels are readily available, domes can be built using solar panels. These serve to reduce heat in the interior by absorbing solar radiation while simultaneously producing electricity that can be used for other purposes.

We may call these ‘solar domes’. Malls and other public places can be built as a network of such solar domes. In conventional buildings today, Sun’s radiation heats the structure which has to be cooled by fans and air conditioners that consume electricity. A solar dome on the other hand shields the structure by absorbing solar radiation and converts it into electricity. So there is a double benefit. This is only the beginning: many more advantages will be discovered as we gain experience.

Implementation of solar power network will prove to be a management challenge. It must be recognized by governments as well as responsible individuals outside the government that management is not the same as administration. India has an oversupply of administrators, but short of management talent, especially in the government. Talented managers are in great demand worldwide and Indian managers are found in many multinationals.

The administrative (IAS) cadre in India can reorient and reinvent it self in getting results as managers of talent and commitment rather than only regulators. Talented managers are an asset while administrators are as best regulators. Tribhuvandas Patel recognized this and engaged Kurien and did not allow IAS officers to take control.

Education will also have to play a major role. School and college curricula today have little to say on solar. This is unfortunate. Schools can teach and excite students by having them do projects using inexpensive solar kits now in the market. Youth organizations can hold ‘solar camps’ helping children create things like ‘solar domes’ and learn about solar and what it can do. Minds that go on to solve India’s (and world’s) energy problems will come from their ranks, not windbag politicians and ‘intellectuals’.