Distributed Energy - Solution for India's energy problems

In my view, renewable energy has the potential to solve power problems of India much more than for the developed world. Because 70% of our population is in 600 thousand villages across India, we need sources of energy which are distributed in nature and can use local resources to generate energy avoiding grid capital costs and distribution losses. Also most of our industries use captive power sources because of unreliable grid availability and these power sources are either Diesel ot coal based.

Fortunately, renewable energy solutions are usually very modular in nature and fit very well in a distributed infrastructure setting, be it solar, wind, biomass or small hydro. If we see from an Indian lens, renewables is more an enabler of distributed energy generation rather than a cleaner energy source (which may matter more for developed world). It being clean is a by-product for us, which is good since then there is no conflict.

India is by and large a sunny country with potential for lot of solar power year round which can be captured using lower technology intensive solutions like micro Solar Thermal. India has large arable land (55% of land is arable which is best in the world) part of which can be used for energy plantation if agriculture yields are increased. Weeds like Babool can be a great source for biomass power because water requirements are very low for Babool and can grow on wastelands (55 million hectares in India is wasteland). India has huge Agri-waste (600 million tonnes) which can be used locally for power generation using either biomass gasification or bio-methanation route. Biomass is a natural solar cell and storage issues, which exist in Solar PV, do not exist because nature stores energy as plant material which can be used for base-load /on-demand power unlike in Solar PV. We do not need West’s complex Solar PV technologies if we can concentrate on growing and efficiently using our biomass resources. The good thing is that economically too, the distributed energy sources like biogas plants are cost competitive to grid electricity if you take into account also the grid cost.

India has about 20 million agriculture pumps which are grossly inefficient. Of these 20 million, 5 million run on diesel which make them very costly to operate (farmers usually pay minimal amount for grid connected electric pumps but they have to pay for diesel). There is an opportunity to create distributed sources of energy which can power these diesel pumps on a standalone basis. The cost of running a diesel pump can be very high (given that it costs close to 30-40 cents/KWh of electricity).

Distributed sources of energy therefore can be very useful in Indian context which may not make sense from developed world perspectives. They usually prefer very high concentrated scale of operation because of good grid connectivity and primary urban power demand. In India, I see first Diesel Generators going out of fashion once the distributed clean energy solutions start coming which are easy to operate, generate power on-demand and are affordable. I think it is time somebody starts thinking replacing DGs given that 25k MW of power is generated by DGs in India. Entrepreneurs are you listening?

Manoj