How to Face India's Future Energy Crisis?

Question

India is located at a perfect location and has the most perfect weather than Why are we not taking advantage of it?
India is surrounded by oceans, meaning coastlines, where its most windy, so why don't we have Wind Turbines to produce Electricity?
India is one of the countries that experiences long summers, and most sunny days, then why don't we have Solar Panels to produce electricity?
These technologies are much better than burning coals to produce electricity, coal burning releases carbon dioxide which is a major cause global warming.
Where as Wind and Solar Energy Technology are clearn energy souces. We have these technology available to us, then Why not use it at a larger scale?

Answer 1

The energy policy of India is characterized by tradeoffs between four major drivers:

Rapidly growing economy, with a need for dependable and reliable supply of electricity, gas, and petroleum products;
Increasing household incomes, with a need for affordable and adequate supply of electricity, and clean cooking fuels;
Limited domestic reserves of fossil fuels, and the need to import a vast fraction of the gas, crude oil, and petroleum product requirements, and recently the need to import coal as well; and
Indoor, urban and regional environmental impacts, necessitating the need for the adoption of cleaner fuels and cleaner technologies.
These trade-offs are often difficult to achieve. For example, the supply of adequate, yet affordable electricity generated and used cleanly is a continuing challenge because expansion of supply, and adoption of cleaner technologies, especially renewable energy, often means that this electricity is too expensive for many Indians, particularly in rural areas.

In recent years, these challenges have led to a major set of continuing reforms and restructuring.

1 Energy conservation
2 Electricity industry
3 Alterative bio-diesel sources
4 Wind power showcase
5 Oil
6 Nuclear power
7 Solar Energy
8 Policy framework

Energy conservation
Energy conservation has emerged as a major policy objective, and the Energy Conservation Act 2001, was passed by the Indian Parliament in September 2001. This Act requires large energy consumers to adhere to energy consumption norms; new buildings to follow the Energy Conservation Building Code; and appliances to meet energy performance standards and to display energy consumption labels. The Act also created the Bureau of Energy Efficiency to implement the provisions of the Act.

Electricity industry
The electricity industry has been restructured by the Electricity Act 2003, which unbundles the vertically integrated electricity supply utilities in each state of India into a transmission utility, and a number of generating and distribution utilities. Electricity Regulatory Commissions in each state set tariffs for electricity sales. The Act also enables open access on the transmission system, allowing any consumer (with a load of greater than 1 MW) to buy electricity from any generator. Significantly, it also requires each Regulatory Commission to specify the minimum percentage of electricity that each distribution utility must source from renewable energy sources.

Alterative bio-diesel sources
The President of India, Dr. Abdul Kalam, is one of the strong advocaters of Jatropha cultivation for production of bio-diesel.[1] In his recent speech, the President said that out of the 60 million hectares (600,000 km²) of waste land that is available in India over 30 million hectares (300,000 km²) are suitable for Jatropha cultivation. Once this plant is grown the plant has a useful lifespan of several decades. During it life Jatropha requires very little water when compared to other cash crops. For plan for supplying incentives to encourage the use of Jatropha has been implemented.

Wind power showcase
The once-impoverished village of Muppandal benefited from the building of the nearby Muppandal wind farm, a renewable energy source, which supplies the villagers with electricity for work.[2][3] The village had been selected as the showcase for India's $2 billion clean energy program which provides foreign companies with tax breaks for establishing fields of wind turbines in the area. Now huge power-producing windmills tower over the palm trees. The village has attracted wind energy producing companies creating thousands of new jobs, dramatically raising the incomes of villagers.[4] The suitability of Muppandal as a site for wind farms stems from its geographical location as it has access to the seasonal monsoon winds.[2]

Oil
Because of political instability in the Middle East and increasing domestic demand for energy, India is keen on decreasing its dependency on OPEC to meet its oil demand, and increasing its energy security. Several Indian oil companies, primarily lead by ONGC and Reliance Industries, have started a massive hunt for oil in several regions in India including Rajasthan, Krishna-Godavari river basin[5] and north-eastern Himalayas. The proposed Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline is a part of India's plan to meet its increasing energy demand.

Nuclear power
While India is self-sufficient in thorium, possessing 24% of the world's known and economically available thorium,[6] it possesses a meager 1% of the similarly calculated global uranium reserves.[7] The United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act is expected to greatly help India in obtaining a steady supply of sufficient nuclear energy in the longer run.

Solar Energy
India's theoretical solar potential is about 5000 TW·h per year (i.e. 600 GW), far more than its current total consumption. Currently solar power is prohibitive due to high initial costs of deployment. However India's long-term solar potential could be unparalleled in the world because it has the ideal combination of both high solar insolation and a big potential consumer base density. [8][9] A major factor influencing a regions energy intensity is the cost of energy consumed for temperature control. Since cooling load requirements, unlike heating, are roughly in phase with the sun's intensity, cooling from intense solar radiation could make perfect energy-economic sense in the subcontinent, whenever the required technology becomes competitively cheaper.

Policy framework
A long-term energy policy perspective is provided by the Integrated Energy Policy Report 2006 which provides policy guidance on energy-sector growth.

Answer 2

Dropping the word 'future' from your question and your view about the problem would be a good first step. If you view it as a problem that hasn't happened yet, then it's hard to motivate people to care about it. The energy crisis is right now, and you listed the solutions. People just don't feel a need to implement those solutions, most of which are extremely costly.

That's the other issue that many people do not understand. Clean energy is super-expensive to produce. The primary resources are usually free (wind, solar), but the devices used to convert those resources into energy are prohibitively expensive. It's a pretty obvious choice when you have an existing coal plant that costs $1 million to run per year or you could build an equally-powerful wind system, but it would cost $20 million... it's pretty obvious that you can run your coal plant for 20 years for the price of *building* your wind plant... not to mention the ongoing maintenance costs which your wind plant will have. In countries where money is tight... the long-term environmental benefit is really not important in that situation.

I don't know the exact numbers for wind vs. coal, but my example should make the point. Poor countries can't afford to throw their money at solutions which will take 30 years or more to have an effect. They have problems they need to fix now which are way more important.

Answer 3

India has a lot of thorium and not much uranium so I'd say they should work on thorium breeders (which they are already doing). Ultimately nuclear of some sort is the only way to do it as fossil fuels release greenhouse gases and nothing else can supply the energy they need (wind and solar can not, the developed world has wasted enough on those technologies to find that out many times over, the developing world can less afford to waste money on them). India can build their own reactors and already has nuclear weapons eliminating any proliferation concerns with respect to India. Transportation fuels are also going to have to be solved, whilst fuel efficient cars like the Tata Nano aren't a bad idea they also will make things worse by causing Jevons paradox to occur and increase demand for oil by making it cheaper to own a car.

Answer 4

You are right we need to explore other energy producing projects and the best will be Bio diesel, Bio Gas, Solor or Wind based once.

The problem here is projects like Biodiesel and Bio gas based once can be made on local level only and we do mot have enough good man power to handle all these projects and Solor and Wind energy projects are very costly.

Answer 5

That is a very good question. And you are absolutely correct. It is up to the people of India to petition and protest for cleaner and reusable energy alternatives. India could become a world leader in this issue, but they need the political will and the support of the people to do this.

Answer 6

By conserving them. country is trying to use all at a larger scale but c the population of the country.

Answer 7

Maybe its the same people picking up the phone when you guys call to buy it, as there is when I call visa with a problem.
America could solve its umemployment problem in a week if we stopped outsourcing all our jobs, and paid people what they were really worth.

Answer 8

Population control would reduce current and greatly impact future energy and all other resources.

Answer 9

well frist of all the us needs to worry about its own probelms if india want to do that go ahead but we dont do anything because we want it

Answer 10

Yeah, what 'Andrew O' said ;-)