Note

Power Without Ruin
Bharat Dogra

The challenge, however, is not just to tackle this mismatch between demand and supply of electricity but also to do this in ways which minimise the possibilities of ecological and social disruption. Plans already exist, at least on paper, that can lead to very massive additions in power supply in a few years, but the biggest problem with these plans is that in their present form these will cause massive environment ruin, displacement and safety risks.

However the good news is that alternative paths are available which while meeting the electricity needs of all people can also reduce ecological and social disruption to a considerable extent. This of course also needs a wider acceptance of the principle of 'need, not greed' so that wasteful forms of electricity use can be avoided.

On the one hand, there are huge possibilities of increasing electricity availbility in more environment friendly ways. For example, the better utilisation of the power generation capacity that has already been created can lead to a significant increase in electricity supply. Secondly, there is significant scope for reducing transmission and distribution losses as well as for improving these in other ways so that tripping possibilities are reduced.

Thirdly better planning of power projects can lead to lower gestation periods. This will also help to avoid several implementation problems and reduce ecological and social loss. Fourthly, the enormous potential of various renewable energy sources should be better tapped. This is not to say that renewable energy sources don't have ecological risks, but these can be better managed and at least the possibility of increase in greenhouse gas emissions can be avoided. Lastly, there is great scope for reducing wasteful forms of electricity use so that a better balance of demand with supply can be achieved.

As environment activists and researchers sympathetic to them look more carefully at the available statistics and other information they are also presenting their own projections of electricity requirements, projections which are much lesser compared to the official estimates even after taking into consideration all essential uses of electricity. If the requirements are not so big, then it should be possible to do without some of the ecologically and socially most disruptive projects. Or perhaps these projects can be redrawn to reduce their harmful impacts. They are also suggesting different methods of meeting power needs, specially in the villages for agriculture, small scale industry and domestic use.

An important effort in this direction has been the widely discussed work of Prof Amulya Kumar N Reddy. A paper ‘A development—focused end-use-oriented (DEFENDUS)’ electricity scenario for Karnataka written with three other colleagues, contrasts the DEFENDUS set of projections and statistics of electricity with those given in the official 'Long range plan for power projects in Karnataka' (LRPPP).

This paper by Prof Reddy and his co-authors concluded that even though the DEFENDUS scenario involved the illumination of all homes in Karnataka, emphasis on employment generating industry, energisation of irrigation pumpsets upto the groundwater potential and the establishment of decentralised rural energy centre in villages, it comes out with an energy requirement which is only about 56 percent of the LRPPP demand.

To meet this demand, the DEFENDUS supply scenario involved a mix of efficiency improvement and electricity substitution, decentralised generation technologies and conventional centralised generation technologies in an approximately 21:25:54 ratio. The environmentally unforgiving technologies were avoided.

The overall bill for the DEFENDUS scenario was estimated to be only about 40 percent of the cost of conventional approach. The DEFENDUS scenario also involved much shorter gestation times because it did not depend only on centralised technologies that will deliver energy and power after about a decade (if all goes well!). While cost reduction and lower gestation period are obviously important, the biggest advantage was that the DEFENDUS scenario was far more environmentally benign.

Other such examples can be given. The point that such researchers and social activists have made is that there is a middle ground between allowing critical shortages to continue and accepting large-scale social ecological disruption.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 42, Apr 28- -May 4, 2013

Your Comment if any