India’s hunger for power
While the country is blessed on many fronts including ability to generate power, solar and hydrogen could take India to new heights with timely support from the government
India needs to increase power generation more than ever
India has survived centuries of slavery and loot, struggled with famines and natural disasters, and perpetual misrule. However, it has stood up each time, resiliently, supported by certain naturo-geographic features.
Despite lakhs being butchered in wars imposed on India, a new crop of young patriots has always replaced the old ones and successfully defended our borders. Despite lack of large-scale irrigation, India has always led the world in terms of food production – rice, wheat, vegetables, milk – leading to some of the lowest prices of these essential items in the world.
Currently, India has emerged as powerhouse of medicines and technology. All these have barely had any role of the government. India is blessed with timely and just adequate monsoons, with several perennial rivers, a long coastline, protection in the form of mountains, and a collective DNA stretching back to thousands of years. All this while, India’s power requirements were slowly being fulfilled by rivers spread across India and imports.
As India finally manages to hold on its own after independence and a disfiguring partition in 1947, special focus needs to be put on a major requirement – power.
According to the government, India’s power generation almost doubled in about the past 15 years – from about 808.5 billion units (BU) in 2009-10 to 1,624 BU in 2022-23. In comparison, the deficit stood at around 12.7% in 2009-10, which dropped to 4% in 2022-23.
However, these figures do not reflect the requirements of electrification in several parts of India, including villages, railways, roads (very poorly lit), and borders. India is on the cusp of an industrial revolution – with cottage/SMEs having the greatest potential – hence, the power requirement is likely to increase exponentially in the coming years.
Against this backdrop, mere 10% target in power generation increase per annum is unlikely to be of much help. Instead, the “governments” (given the increasing chauvinism among states) must allow the people to take over domestic power generation (solar) while focusing on generating promising fuels like hydrogen for transport.
India’s peak demand for electricity stands at around 2.2 lakh MW. The target for Roof Top Solar (RTS) programme for the next year is 4 GW (4,000 MW), ie, about 1.8% of total demand. This has to change, especially given the success of 5G roll-out and UPI.
The government has incentivized DISCOMs (the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has released Rs.908 crore as incentive to various DISCOMs so far) to expand RTS, but as in case of BSNL, this is fraught with dangers of failing even before the start. Some states like Tamil Nadu are disincentivizing people by raising power tariffs, but it is only adding to the misery.
What the “governments” need to do is provide e-coupons to people to avail RTS and use DISCOMs to just install the equipment with no hard money involved. This would encourage people to instal RTS, popularise it, avoid corruption like fake connections seen with BSNL, and tap into the enormous potential of RTS. There should be several other ideas which the governments must invite from people and implement at the earliest.
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