India's Energy Landscape

Always wondered how over a billion people get to fulfill their energy needs. Or do they? Half the country's population still does not have access to electricity, most of the other half lives in power outages. She is also running out of oil reserves. Money put in over 70% oil imports put her economical imbalance. She is very rich in coal reserves, third largest producer in the world, but that raises environmental concerns. Nuclear power, days were spent over which in discussion in the parliament, serves only 3% of electricity needs and has no future. So, is there hope?

Renewable energy, in the form of solar and wind, is only a small part of the solution. India is one of very few countries that receives solar energy for over 300 days in the year but solar power has been well under-installed. Wind blows at good speeds in the southern states with India being the third largest producer of wind energy but there is lot more to do. Government estimates a potential of 20 GW each from wind and solar which in the end is a small fraction of the total electricity generation. What else?

Natural Gas! This source has been gaining traction globally due to its cleaner burning nature as compared to coal. But India generates only around 7% electricity from its natural gas resources. The search for natural gas overseas has increased a lot over the past years with gas pipelines being set up with Iran and Bangladesh.

Nuclear still remains to be generating less than 3% of total electricity in spite of the big plans by the government and the Atomic Energy Commission. A major setback has been reduced foreign cooperation after the nuclear tests of 1974 and 1998. Although, India has recently gone into agreements with other countries including the United States, chances of nuclear being the major source of energy in the future appears slim.

In short, India needs to first focus on getting electricity to everyone in the country and reduce power outages. This would need more generation and hence more plant installations. More coal plants mean major environmental concerns. Clean coal could be an option not only with cleaning it off ash but also finding out ways to capture CO2 and other pollution control measures. The renewable sources like wind, solar and biomass need to be utilized to maximum capacity as early as possible. And in the meantime, as much oil and natural gas that can be obtained from is a bonus.

Its not going to be easy to feed energy requirements of over a billion people in a country thats developing at a fast rate, but government decisions need to be backed by good analysis, planning and investment for the future!!

Business and The Environment

Business & Environment, two systems that for almost a century have been so repulsive to each other that discussing them together is no doubt a grand task. Businesses in the process of making profits humiliating the environment and the environment now in its imbalanced self pressing the need to make fundamental changes in which we do our business. Business was created for social well being but now has only been reduced to a profit making organization. The fundamental flaw with businesses is to break all limits and grow no matter even the limit is ecological.

A beautiful example outlining the differences between the two, is cited by Paul Hawken in his universally acclaimed book The Ecology of Commerce. He talks about the definition of 'resource' in the two different perspectives. The economics of business defines it as something that does not exist as long as its not mined, extracted, and made available for consumption. The ecology/environment side of it is a total reverse.

So how can the two co-exist if the fundamentals are so different? Will we ever be able to change the way we carry out business to protect our environment?

A lot of companies, today have conjugated 'sustainability' as part of their business needs. Investments made, profits sacrificed to have less impact on the environment. But is this the solution?? In a market based economy, can a business thrive by not making huge profits? It defies the whole idea of conducting business. This method of capital investment based - environmental protection contradicts and endangers the sole existence of a business.

But why is it costly for a business to make environmental friendly moves? If only we could reverse that!!

The answer is simple and lies in the very heart of how business is conducted, where the cost incurred to conduct one is only monetary, not considering the environmental impacts as included costs. This would not affect the fundamental thinking behind a business and would also be a motivation to care for the environment, which in turn would make huge profits and would make a business market competitive. No doubt something to think about!

The ideas presented in this post are a lot inspired by Paul Hawken's book The Ecology of Commerce - a must read for all.

Building Renewables!

Is the future of renewables also dependent on fossil fuels of today? Are depleting and more expensive fossil fuels also taking away the last hope we have?

Oil, Coal and Natural gas, the fossil fuels that drive our economy, have seen rising price trends (Figures provided: U.S. specific trends: Source: http://rn-economicanalysis.com/) in the past decades, which does not come as a surprise. To the extent, that the price of oil has multiplied 4 times since 2000, natural gas 3 times and coal approximately doubled its monetary (nominal) value since January 2000. Again, all these prices also reflects global trends, except for may be natural gas where the U.S. market for natural gas is highly domesticated.

The economic growth (as defined by economists) is dependent on a trend of infinite production and consumption, expansion, more extraction. Not realizing that all this takes place in a context of a limited planet, finite resources. The economic progress is only defined by high GDP' s with no ecological perspective and also no measure of social well being (that's where sustainability comes in). Fossil fuels that took millions of years to form and accumulate have been used to mark human progress over the past century. To the extent that we are so dependent on these depleting fossil fuels that we might find it very difficult to sustain it.

Yes, this is where we talk of the renewable energy options in the form of wind, solar, biomass, geothermal. Each of these technologies has its own problems of intermittent supply, storage etc. and so the future plan may be to develop an energy mix that will not be completely dependent on only one of these technologies. But, looking at the price trends for fossil fuels (85% of energy we consume today) are we in a position to build a renewable energy supported economy??

Its only an irony, that even building such a clean energy economy (over a period of decades) requires massive amounts of fast depleting fossil fuels. Also, a higher price over fossil fuels makes building a new technology on a vast commercial scale more expensive and hence less viable economically. The best time to start building such a technology will be right now, before we consume the resource for its own existence.

End of Easy Energy

The 'End of Easy Energy' has been much talked about in the past few years. Geologists call it the 'peak oil', economists measure it with 'rising oil prices', academia finds it in textbooks and news columns, but is each one of us aware of one of the most important events in the history of mankind and the impact its going to have on our lives?

Lets make it very simple. Three steps and you will know what the talk is all about.

One, we do know that all growth is dependent on use of energy be it taking a ride down the road or building the whole civilization. 40% of that energy comes from oil. (relatively cheap at the moment). More than 90% of that oil goes into fueling the transportation sector. Another industry that oil affects considerably, is the agricultural sector. The food products that we use would downsize by a third if the oil was not used to run the heavy agricultural machinery for production. (more on the impact of oil on agriculture later).

Two, is the economics of oil pricing, that people tend to follow to measure peak oil. So, what keeps the prices of oil still low? Lets get rid of this deception which has been confusing all.
The current price of oil, which is determined by simple economics of demand (consumer controlled) and supply (supplier controlled), can be explained by the declining economies of the world - less consumption (and thus less demand) - less depletion of oil resources. Thus, today the only oil in competition to determine oil price is the cheap oil. The problem lies ahead with reviving economies and growing demand, with rising marginal prices when the relatively expensive (hard to extract) oil comes into the picture.

Three, is the over dependence on oil that explains all our growth that we have had in the past century. Agriculture, transportation, buildings - every other form of human defined growth that we can think of is some way or the other driven by cheap oil. This prosperity will decline with the decline of oil.

Our cheap and luxurious lifestyle is on the verge of collapse. The more we ignore it, the more difficult the survival is going to be.
I invite my readers to please comment.

The Road to Perdition

"Look you gotta choice,
either you fix it or I can...
but if I will, you wont like it,
because I will throw everything away including you.."
The warnings from The Nature, are now loud and clear, more than ever!

The long list of ecological problems that we face now, never stops to scare me..
global warming
growing population
water scarcity
oil peaking and declining
deforestation
wild forest fires...

so how did we get here?

We live in a 'developed world' living a life of comfort and luxury. But is that progress?
from 1 billion in 1850 to 6 billion in 21st century and still counting. Is that how we measure progress?

We have measured progress by expansion, by economic activity, political strengths, military might - but we never had an ecological perspective. In the 20th century our progress was all about consuming our resources with greater efficiency to build a materialistic world.
21st will be all about watching it go away.

The primary reason but not the only one for a civilization to end is growing beyond capacity. The societies becoming more complex. Difficulty with complexity is that it always collapses if one supporting ingredient goes missing and devastation is as sophisticated as the system itself. Then we fight not to develop, but to maintain the status-quo.

Resource scarcity is one of the first and major problems that we are going to deal with. The first and the most difficult one would be the scarcity of oil. Every item that we see around us, travels an average of 1500 miles to reach us, only because of cheap petroleum. Oil is the lifeline of any economy today. declining oil production is now imminent. Its gonna change the way we live our lives. Its a big one, but are we ready for life 'After Peak Oil'?

Look at the way we consume resources in our everyday life. Our dependency on machines and products for every possible human activity. Use of electricity and lights even when we dont need it. Even when we finally look to flex some muscles and get in shape, we dont miss out on using the sophisticated devices that guzzle up energy. We must understand that the energy that we use today, is still not renewable. once consumed, it goes away forever.

The time has come to make imminent changes to avoid or to rightly say reduce the negative impact of all that we have done to our environment. Its time to act before its too late.

I take great privilege in starting this blog. I invite my fellow humans, to share my concern and help all of us to confront the upcoming environmental challenges. I will try to be as regular as I can with my articles, and expect my readers to share their views on different matters. We have to fight this to the end together, and I start here.