Green Energy

By Prof. Soli J. Arceivala

Summary

Green Energy is a Forum of Free Enterprise booklet by Prof. Soli J. Arceivala, an environmental engineer and former Chief Environmental Health expert with WHO/UN South-East Asia. Editor Sunil S. Bhandare’s introduction frames the core dilemma: India’s per capita energy availability must rise six-fold over the coming decades, yet its room for additional carbon emissions is only about three-fold — a structural mismatch between development aspiration and ecological constraint. Arceivala’s reply, written in plain prose for a general policy audience, is that India must mainstream renewables now and treat them as the price-competitive default rather than a virtuous luxury.

The bulk of the booklet is a practitioner’s tour of alternative-energy options. Arceivala concentrates on the three he judges most viable at 2011 prices — wind, solar, and biomass — and folds in shorter sections on hydro, shale gas, coal gas, LNG/CNG/LPG, biofuels (Jatropha and ethanol), nuclear, wave, and geo-thermal energy. Each is examined for installed capacity, capital cost, payback, land requirements, and policy frictions. The reader is taken from the cube-of-speed physics of wind turbines through coastal wind-tunnelling sites, off-shore floating farms (StatoilHydro), Suzlon’s export footprint, IDFC- and DLF-backed wind ventures, and ONGC’s 50 MW farm at Kutch, to solar lanterns and water heaters with two-year paybacks, to large concentrated-solar projects in Rajasthan and the Thar, to satellite-based CSP as a frontier idea.

The booklet’s underlying argument is liberal and pragmatic rather than environmentalist. Arceivala notes that ‘hard-headed businessmen’ will only switch when costs converge — which they are doing — and proposes a fiscal-policy and public-private-partnership architecture (accelerated depreciation, captive-generation feed-in tariffs at Rs 18.50/kWh, reverse selling to the grid, German-style feedback payments) to accelerate that convergence. Three policy reforms are named as urgent: a more people-friendly land-acquisition regime (the Jaitapur nuclear and Singur/Nandigram experiences are flagged), a research policy that picks promising technologies such as wave energy, and a fiscal policy oriented to PPP investment in renewables. The volume closes with a biographical tribute to Shailesh Kapadia (1949–1988), a Bombay chartered accountant whose memorial trust sponsored the booklet, and the Forum’s signature A. D. Shroff epigraph on free enterprise.

Key points

• Sets up the central tension: India’s per capita energy needs must grow six-fold while permissible carbon emissions can only triple, forcing a green-energy pivot.

• Arceivala defines ‘GREEN’ as ‘Growth with Resources, Environment Enhancement and Nature’ — energy that grows the economy without exhausting or polluting it.

• Concentrates on wind, solar, and biomass as the three presently viable renewables at 2011 prices, with secondary treatment of hydro, shale gas, biofuels, nuclear, wave, and geo-thermal.

• Reports that renewables were under 3% of India’s energy mix in 2010, against a national target of around 20% by 2020 — requiring fiscal incentives and large public-private investment.

• Wind discussion covers the cube-of-speed physics, monsoon seasonality, accelerated depreciation as a tax-saving lever, offshore floating farms (StatoilHydro), Suzlon’s exports, and ventures by IDFC, DLF, JSW Green Energy, and ONGC.

• Solar section walks through cookers, water heaters, TERI-type lanterns (targeted at displacing 1 billion litres of kerosene annually by 2022), stand-alone PV for telecom and water treatment, grid-connected rooftop PV, and concentrated solar power in Rajasthan, the Thar, and Spain/US analogues.

• Biomass and waste-to-energy receive substantial treatment: gobar-gas plants, UASB reactors, BARC’s ‘Nisargruna’ bio-methanation units, Thermax/Lambion partnerships, and Karnataka’s 4.5 MW biomass plant as a model.

• Names three urgent policy reforms — land acquisition, research direction (especially wave energy), and fiscal policy — and ends with the claim that wind, solar, hydro and wave energy ‘would win hands down’ as the sources to concentrate on.

• Frames the project in classical-liberal terms: market price advantage, private-public partnership, and feedback payment to private generators, rather than command-and-control environmentalism.

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