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Bangalore: India's
energy needs can be met entirely by solar and other renewable
sources, says a new study by two professors at the Indian
Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. Their report published
in the journal Current Science may add ammunition to the
anti-nuclear agitation in India.
The analysis by Hiremath Mitavachan and Jayaraman Srinivasan of
IISc's Divecha Centre for Climate Change overturns the argument
that nuclear power is essential for India because the country does
not have enough land to exploit the potential of solar energy in
India.
According to their study, 4.1 percent 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 will be further reduced to 3.1 percent "if we bring
the other potential renewable energy sources of India into
picture", they claim. They conclude that land availability is not
a limiting constraint for the solar source as believed.
They say their calculations are based on present-day solar
photovoltaic (PV) technology and do not include higher
efficiencies achieved by new solar cells. Neither have they
considered roof-top PV systems that can be established without any
need for additional land.
The IISc researchers' conclusion is in conformity with that of a
report prepared last year by the Australian government which said:
"There is more than enough suitable land in India, with high
direct beam solar, to meet the entire nation's electricity needs
in principle."
Convinced 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.
Coal power plants not only transform the land around the facility
but also require land for mining coal and its upstream processing,
the authors note. 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 the land that goes into mining uranium.
"Our study shows that solar power plants require less land in
comparison to hydro-power plants and are comparable with coal and
nuclear energy power generation when life-cycle transformations
are considered," Srinivasan said.
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.
The roof-top solar power technology, along with that proposed by
IISc professors, "will be able to meet most of the electricity
demand, and has the potential to transform the power sector," says
Shankar Sarma, a power policy analyst and author of forthcoming
book "Integrated Power Policy."
Atul Chokshi of the IISc Department of Materials Engineering and
an expert on solar energy agrees. He reported recently that a
three kilowatt rooftop solar panel system on the 425 million
households can generate a total energy per year 1900 TWh - half of
the projected energy demand by 2070.
(K.S. Jayaraman can be contacted at killugudi@hotmail.com)
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