Powering India in an efficient way!

BANGALORE, INDIA: Power cuts are a fairly common situation in India, with close to 40% of our population not having access to power and basic infrastructure facilities. With the Indian economy on an accelerated growth trajectory, the demand for power and energy will continue to rise year after year. The gap today is in the range of 10% and is increasing every year. Meeting this increasing demand calls for an increase in capacity addition. The other way of overcoming this demand-supply parity is by conserving power, reducing consumption or efficient use of power.

As an economy, India is heavily reliant on fossil fuels for energy needs. This dependance on fossil fuels has to reduce as the availability of coal continues to decrease with each passing year. It is now time to take stock of the ways in which we can increase the reliance on domestic supply of energy and move away from being overly dependent on import of fossil fuel.

The first step towards reducing energy usage in any industry is by studying the pattern of energy usage; for instance 75% of the energy in any large building is consumed by the air conditioners. Simple optimization of usage along with reduction in consumption not only helps save energy but also results in substantial cost savings, which can be deployed to other more useful purposes. Until recently, the power sector has not received much attention, thereby making it more challenging to successfully adopt energy efficient practices.

Power is the lifeline of any industry; industrial growth is significantly dependent on the growth of enterprises, which is in turn dependent on access to energy. Industries must look at adopting renewable energy sources such as solar power, to reduce dependency on traditional sources of power. We are fortunate to have over 3000 hours of sunshine in India, which can be utilized as an alternate source of energy, with the help of photovoltaic technology. Yet another source is wind where we have large potential of the order 40GW per year. The initial cost may be on higher side however the same is coming down at a much faster rate and, without factoring the carbon footprint, will be at grid parity by 2017.

Most power plants are not aware of their energy consumption, since their main objective is profit maximization. Significant energy can be saved by just monitoring, managing and controlling auxiliary consumption. The next step would be to invest in energy efficient equipment to gain long term advantage and finally, implementation of renewable sources of energy to power daily operations.

While latest technology such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and co-firing with biomass is available, power utilities have to integrate them into the value chain and not deploy them in silos. Improving the efficiency of energy utilisation in our power plants is the way forward.

An emerging economy like India has the opportunity to take leadership in energy efficient practices by bringing up the percentage of low carbon footprint technologies like solar, wind, hydro, micro -hydro and so on.

We are headed towards the right direction with the introduction of energy labeling on major energy-consuming appliances and a national Energy Conservation Building Code for new commercial buildings but there is significant scope to improve. Today, on National Energy Conservation Day, it might be time to pause and ponder.

The author is Chairman at IET Power Panel.