CB BureauA study by two professors at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore asserts that India’s energy needs can be met entirely by solar and other renewable sources. The report, published in the journal Current Science, contradicts the widely propagated theory that the country does not have enough land to exploit the potential of solar energy – an argument that is also put across by those who insist that nuclear power is essential for India.
According to the analysis by Hiremath Mitavachan and Jayaraman Srinivasan of IISc’s Divecha Centre for Climate Change, 4.1 per cent of the total uncultivable and waste land area in India is enough to meet the projected annual demand of 3,400 terawatt-hour (TWh) by 2070 by solar energy alone (1 terawatt-hour per year equals 114 megawatts). The land area required can be brought down to 3.1 per cent if other potential renewable energy sources are harnessed.
The professors say their calculations are based on present-day solar photovoltaic (PV) technology and do not include higher efficiencies achieved by new solar cells. They have also left out rooftop PV systems that can be established without using additional land.
Based on their hypothesis that sunlight differs from other energy sources in the way it uses the land, the researchers compared the land-use pattern of three primary energy sources – coal, nuclear and hydro – with solar energy. They then calculated the percentage of India’s land area that would be required to meet the future projected energy demand.
The researchers’ conclusion: coal power plants not only transform the land around the facility but also require land for mining coal and its upstream processing. An average dam displaces 31,340 persons and submerges 8,748 hectares of land. The direct land footprint of a nuclear power plant includes power plant area, buffer zone, waste disposal area and land for mining uranium.
While nuclear and fossil fuel-based technologies must continuously transform some land to extract the fuels or dispose of the waste, this is not the case with solar plants. In fact, the same land used for PV solar power plants can be utilised for other purposes like grazing.
A recent study by KPMG had estimated that the rising cost of conventional power, largely driven by increasing raw material exports and the growing cost of establishing greenfield projects, alongside a steady decline in solar power prices – mostly a function of a sharp reduction in the prices of solar photovoltaic modules – could result in solar projects reaching grid parity by 2014. Grid parity is the point at which the cost of solar power equals the cost of utility power from conventional sources.
‘India’s solar capacity has grown from less than 20 Mw to more than 1,000 Mw in the last two years,’ the KPMG study reported. By 2017, this could grow to 12,500 Mw of solar power generation capacity. This prediction is based on the expectation that the landed cost of conventional electricity to consumers will increase over the next decade at the rate of between 4 and 5.5 per cent every year. Solar power prices are likely to decline at the rate of 5-7 per cent annually during this period. PV module prices have come down by around 40 per cent in the last 18 months.
Santosh Kamath, partner (energy & natural resources), KPMG India, believes that by 2017 there is potential for the development of 4,000 Mw through the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission and other state programmes, 2,500 Mw of captive solar installations, 2,000 Mw of solar projects for diesel replacement and 4,000 Mw of rooftop solar generation capacity.
This scale of growth, according to the report, means that by the end of the 13th Plan period (2022) solar projects could meet as much as seven per cent of India’s power requirement, cutting out 30 per of coal imports and creating foreign exchange savings of up to $8 billion.