原创 Building a Sustainable Energy Future 2/2

India has the opportunity to wisely direct the investment that needs to be made. How should this be done? This should be tackled on several parallel fronts. Energy efficient products should be one of the first issues to be tackled. Lighting continues to be a need for the people who are either without electricity or suffer from hours of denied electricity service everyday. Cutting back from traditional incandescent, even fluorescent lighting towards more efficient lighting technologies, such as solid state lighting, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 90%. It should be recognized that if an individual or a community meets their electricity requirements with dramatically reduced peak demand, then this translates into a permanent reduction in generation capacity that has to be connected. This translates into negative watts or ‘negawatts’ that have to be provided by the government, when compared with the conventional load that the community would represent. For a small village with 1000 homes, this could be as much as Rs 20 crores in capital cost savings that may be realized if such communities adopt a lower energy solution, with additional operating fuel cost savings of as much as Rs 10 crores over 20 years, if the solution is carbon-neutral.

Providing even half the saved capital investment as a subsidy could seed the formation of thousands of electricity cooperatives or ‘co-ops’ that provide carbon-free energy for select applications. This could be from renewable resources such as bio-gas generation, or solar/wind power all mixed with energy storage and distributed microgrid technologies, and could be rapidly implemented by private enterprise. Proper documentation and validation of avoided carbon emissions could provide additional financial benefits through carbon credits that could enhance the financial viability of such projects. Whether such projects are implemented at the village level using the co-op model, or at an individual home owner level using micro-credit programs, there is significant benefit to be realized at the national and individual level, by seeding the creation of such carbon-neutral energy hubs.

Just as most of India jumped directly to mobile phones, bypassing the traditional land-line, we need to move directly to a carbon-neutral energy infrastructure – starting with our villages. By choosing the most efficient technologies for lighting, electronic loads, heating, cooling and transportation, one can directly tackle the problem of bringing energy to the masses, at a cost point that is lower than a traditional infrastructure build-out would cost. From the outset, we should introduce energy access, not as an entitlement, but as a service, the cost of which varies depending on availability of the resource. For a population increasingly comfortable with variable cell phone rates, and currently facing a situation of no electricity at all, this may be fully acceptable.

Such an approach can provide a win-win scenario at the individual, state and national level, while also allowing reduction in carbon emissions – good at the planetary level. Appropriate financial incentives offer savings in public investments needed, and provide incentives for the private sector to establish and scale a sustainable energy infrastructure. This will also trigger the deployment of large amounts of competitive solutions, such as biogas, solar PV and efficient lighting solutions, driving the costs down as production volumes scale up to meet demand.

It is time to question the basic assumptions that drive us forward into a new tomorrow. When people ask whether we can afford to adopt ‘expensive’ new solutions, the question should really be – can we afford to not adopt these solutions!