Move from culture of plenty to that of responsibility

BANGALORE, INDIA: Imagine a world, where power outages are self healing, customer no more pay for the electricity consumption, the transfer of power from a loaded scenario to lighter is seamless, the network stays uniform and so on.

This is the scenario of smarter grid as envisioned by Gopichand Katragadda, general manager, India engineering operations, GE Energy Infrastructure.

“A smart grid involves hybrid electrical vehicle where the customer would work on port and plug-in, where energy is efficiently stored in many forms than chemical storage, compressed storage and that has distributed /local generation of electricity of populated zones,” Katragadda elaborated.

According to him, a smart grid consists of the factors like wireless AMI, wide area protection, visualization and high capacity and high speed. Explaining further, he brought the scenario of human body where energy is transferred through neurons and DNA.

He said, “The process of energy transfer should work like a neuron which is analog, unique and massively networked and also the DNA, which is digital, copied, static and distributed.”

Moving on to the present solutions and the challenges in energy generation from natural resources like wind, solar and gas, he added that while generating the natural energy, one should look at the entire lifecycle, from the raw materials to processing and the final produce.

“We should not follow the traditional ways of generating energy of the cost of the environment. And it is high time we moved to the culture of responsibility from the culture of plenty,”  Katragadda added.

India is situated on light wind corridor, where its wind speed is around 8-10 m/s, while the equipment (wind mills) are made for other countries where the wind speed spans from 12-18 m/s. 

He suggested that the windmills should have increased axle, which provides increased swept area. This compensated with the lower wind speed while generating substantial energy. Companies can also work for over the turbine, making them more intelligent and apply the aerodynamics to the mills to increase efficiency.

Talking about the solar power, Katragadda said that companies should look beyond the option of Photo-voltaic. “Companies should look at concentrated thermal power. There are new options like solar thermals, parabolic trough, power towers and many more,” he said.

At this point, Jason Ponting, Editor-in-Chief, Technology Review, MIT, raised the concern about low economy of solar energy. Giving an example of Chicago, he said that the PV cells contribute to less than one per cent of the total capacity.

Ponting said that the solar PV installation is done today only through government subsidies, but the low returns is a huge concern, hence the industry which is bringing massive innovations in science and software should also look at this sector.