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| Solar future | | India should pay attention to alternative fuels | | by Madanjeet Singh
VESTIGES of the Cold War in United States policy towards India are evident from the manner in which American lawmakers have been shifting the so-called goal posts of the July 18 2005 agreement with US President George Bush. The US government has no intention of admitting India into the exclusive club of the five nuclear weapon states or as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. On the other hand, agreements that allow US agencies and companies to sell India nuclear fuel and outdated technology perfectly suit their commercial interests.
The United States has not built a nuclear power plant in more than three decades. All reactors ordered after 1973 were cancelled. Even at present, with all the incentives which the US administration is offering, the majority of senior utility executives in the United States do not want to take the risk of Chernobyl-type accidents. Nor do they want to build new nuclear plants unless the government guaranties full subsidy, with assurance that radioactive contamination will be prevented by opening several nuclear waste repositories, as reported in the International Herald Tribune dated 22 August 2006.
The French government with its large number of nuclear power reactors is already in a quandary, offering large sums of money for storage of its radioactive waste which no country is willing to accept. India hardly has the resources to spare that kind of money to subsidise new nuclear reactors and build the extremely expensive radioactive nuclear waste repositories.
I am firmly of the view that by the end of the century a solar energy economy will prevail, when fossil fuels would have been exhausted and nuclear power entrepreneurs would find it impossible to store mountains of radioactive waste.
I have visited several major solar energy projects in the remote and poorer regions of Africa, Australia, the Americas and Asia. An unforgettable experience was my visit to Inner Mongolia, where, driving mile after mile along the road in this vast, treeless landmass, I was amazed to see hundreds of small, hybrid, solar-energy systems – comprising a small wind turbine with a photovoltaic panel – installed on the roofs of houses and even on the top of yurts, which the nomads move seasonally with their animals. There I witnessed the ‘human face’ of solar energy, integrated with the environment, culture and traditions of the people.
In India, camels are often used to carry photovoltaic panels to remote and backward areas in the Rajasthan desert, such as Megh-wallon-ki-dhani, a village inhabited by marginalized people belonging to the schedule castes. The Sumitra Foundation has installed a number of photovoltaic solar systems to provide electricity for the 40 health and education centres in the remote tribal region of Bastar, now in Chhatisgarh.
The spin-off benefits of renewable energies are also of the greatest importance. Small and dispersed solar-energy projects in rural areas, including individual photovoltaic plants, biomass and small hydro facilities, have a cardinal role to play in halting the increasing rush to the cities by peasants living in the poorest regions.
Such projects, by virtue of their local and participatory nature, are also more ‘democratic’, tending to create new cooperative structures that resist the concentration of power in a few authoritarian hands as in the management of nuclear power plants. By promoting sustainable development based on partnership with nature, they protect the environment and favour the emergence of a culture of peace, which is inseparable from democracy and grassroots development.
Above all, the future of the solar energy economy depends on the development of fuel-cell technology, a remarkable demonstration of which I saw in Germany at the biogas-fuel-cell project of a waste-water plant on the banks of the river Rhine, at Cologne-Rodenkirchen. Here the city’s refuse is collected, converted into digester gas containing 62 per cent methane, from which hydrogen is produced to run a fuel-cell facility. This, Europe’s first regenerating fuel-cell plant, not only serves to electrify Rodenkirchen but also prevents helps control pollution of the River Rhine, in which the waste was previously dumped.
Earlier I had attended a meeting in Cambridge, UK, of motorcar manufacturers working on the development of fuel-cell technology. Dr. Stan Ovshinsky, Director, Energy Conversion Devices, USA, visualised that after fuel-cell engines have been sufficiently miniaturised for use in small vehicles, they could also be connected to generate electricity for residences, thus dispensing with grids for electricity. In fact, the scientists at this meeting from Japan, Germany and the United States, were all secretly working day and night, each probing to find out what others were doing without revealing the progress of their own research.
The first step on the road to a hydrogen-based economy was taken in 1998 at the Daimler-Benz plant in Germany where a prototype station wagon, ‘Necar II’, run on hydrogen energy, was launched. The commercial use of hydrogen-based engines by three red London buses plying between the Tower of London and Covent Garden is noteworthy. London is not alone. Hydrogen-powered bus projects are being prepared all over the world. From Cambridge to California, Norway to Nagoya, Perth to Porto, pilot schemes are being readied. This month Shell announced a partnership with the Dutch bus manufacturer MAN that will see 20 hydro-buses on the streets of Rotterdam by 2009.
It is high time that India, too, pays more attention to renewable solar energy, and catch up with the worldwide research in hydrogen-based fuel-cell technology by increasing government support, instead of going on a wild goose chase and beating about the ‘Bush’ for some outdated American nuclear equipment. Thanks to our very capable scientists, India can do without becoming subservient to any other country.
The writer has worked with UNESCO on solar energy and is the author of “The Timeless Energy of the Sun,”.
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