India’s green power

 In the next decade or so, India hopes to gradually replace hydrogen produced from fossil fuels with purer green hydrogen in two major sectors: petroleum refining and fertiliser production

The Union cabinet approved the National Green Hydrogen Mission with the aim of making India a global hub in the production of green hydrogen. Many industry experts argue that the timing of the cabinet approval indicates two things. First, the government is aware of this grand mission’s financial implications and has a kitty of Rs 19,744 crore to fund the initiative. Second, India, being one of the five countries putting its money on the table for green hydrogen, knows that there is no fixed template for incentives in this domain and that establishing a clean energy source hub is a tough task. 

India is aiming for a big push. The target is to produce at least five million metric tonnes of green hydrogen per annum by 2030, with the potential to reach 10 MMT per annum that could cater to the export market. In the next decade or so, India hopes to gradually replace hydrogen produced from fossil fuels with purer green hydrogen in two major sectors: petroleum refining and fertiliser production. The mission would also help India cut down approximately 50 MMT of annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This is in sync with India’s commitment towards the legally binding Paris Agreement of 2015. Employment generation and development of cutting-edge technologies can be accrued benefits once electrolysers, essential for the green hydrogen transition programme, are manufactured in the country.

Two conditions must be met for the green hydrogen mission to take off. There must be optimum demand for green hydrogen by making user industries transition to the cleaner fuel with obligations. Feasible subsidies must be granted to end users to attain parity with grey hydrogen obtained from natural gas and potentially nullify India’s import of liquefied natural gas. This would, in turn, create a consistent demand for green hydrogen and catalyse production of the fuel to incentivise the green ecosystem. The solar power industry, too, would benefit from green hydrogen since solar power requires renewable energy.

However, the success of the mission would depend on the execution of projects by the companies that are its stakeholders. Private sector giants, public sector navratnas as well as renewable energy majors have made ambitious announcements pertaining to the sector. For India’s green hydrogen mission to fructify, it would need plenty of business development activity and compliance with international regulatory norms. The real challenge would be to harmonise standards and certification systems for green hydrogen globally. While this will be a challenge for countries all over the world, India could play a pivotal role in facilitating it given its G20 presidency with a prerogative to champion the Global South.

The cabinet approval for the National Green Hydrogen Mission sends a positive signal to the private and global investing fraternity. Above all, it will give a much-needed impetus to the states to commence their own actions aligned with the principle of decarbonisation. If synchronised and executed properly, it would help India meet its long-term energy needs.

Chiranjib Haldar

Source: The Telegraph, 6/03/23

Why fusion could be a clean-energy breakthrough

 

Using powerful lasers to focus enormous energy on a miniature capsule half the size of a BB, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California started a reaction that produced about 1.5 times more energy than was contained in the light used to produce it.

The major advance in fusion research announced in Washington on Tuesday was decades in coming, with scientists for the first time able to engineer a reaction that produced more power than was used to ignite it.

Using powerful lasers to focus enormous energy on a miniature capsule half the size of a BB, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California started a reaction that produced about 1.5 times more energy than was contained in the light used to produce it. There are decades more to wait before fusion could one day — maybe — be used to produce electricity in the real world. But the promise of fusion is enticing. If harnessed, it could produce nearly limitless, carbon-free energy to supply humanity’s electricity needs without raising global temperatures and worsening climate change.

At the press conference in Washington, the scientists celebrated. “So, this is pretty cool,” said Marvin “Marv” Adams, the National Nuclear Security Administration deputy administrator for defense programs.

“Fusion fuel in the capsule got squeezed, fusion reactions started. This had all happened before – 100 times before – but last week for the first time they designed this experiment so that the fusion fuel stayed hot enough, dense enough and round enough for long enough that it ignited,” said Adams. “And it produced more energy than the lasers had deposited.”Here’s a look at exactly what nuclear fusion is, and some of the difficulties in turning it into the cheap and carbon-free energy source that scientists hope it can be.

What is nuclear fusion?

Look up, and it’s happening right above you — nuclear fusion reactions power the sun and other stars.The reaction happens when two light nuclei merge to form a single heavier nucleus. Because the total mass of that single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei, the leftover mass is energy that is released in the process, according to the Department of Energy.In the case of the sun, its intense heat — millions of degrees Celsius — and the pressure exerted by its gravity allow atoms that would otherwise repel each other to fuse.

 Scientists have long understood how nuclear fusion has worked and have been trying to duplicate the process on Earth as far back as the 1930s. Current efforts focus on fusing a pair of hydrogen isotopes — deuterium and tritium — according to the Department of Energy, which says that particular combination releases “much more energy than most fusion reactions” and requires less heat to do so.

How valuable could this be?

Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy and society at the University of California at Berkeley, said nuclear fusion offers the possibility of “basically unlimited” fuel if the technology can be made commercially viable. The elements needed are available in seawater.It’s also a process that doesn’t produce the radioactive waste of nuclear fission, Kammen said. Crossing the line of net energy gain marks a major achievement, said Carolyn Kuranz, a University of Michigan professor and experimental plasma physicist.“Of course, now people are thinking, well, how do we go to 10 times more or 100 times more? There’s always some next step,” Kuranz said. “But I think that’s a clear line of, yes, we have achieved ignition in the laboratory.”

How are scientists trying to do this?

One way scientists have tried to recreate nuclear fusion involves what’s called a tokamak — a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber that uses powerful magnets to turn fuel into a superheated plasma (between 150 million and 300 million degrees Celsius) where fusion may occur.The Livermore lab uses a different technique, with researchers firing a 192-beam laser at a small capsule filled with deuterium-tritium fuel. The lab reported that an August 2021 test produced 1.35 megajoules of fusion energy — about 70% of the energy fired at the target. The lab said several subsequent experiments showed declining results, but researchers believed they had identified ways to improve the quality of the fuel capsule and the lasers’ symmetry.

Why is fusion so hard?

It takes more than extreme heat and pressure. It also takes precision. The energy from the lasers must be applied precisely to counteract the outward force of the fusion fuel, according to Stephanie Diem, an engineering physics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. And that’s just to prove net energy gain is possible. It’s even harder to produce electricity in a power plant. For example, the lab’s lasers can only fire a few times a day. To viably produce energy, they would need to fire rapidly and capsules would need to be inserted multiple times a minute, or even faster, Kuranz said.Another challenge is to increase efficiency, said Jeremy Chittenden, a professor at Imperial College in London specializing in plasma physics. The lasers used at Livermore require a lot of electrical energy, and researchers need to figure out a way to reproduce their results in a much more cost-effective way, he said.

Source: Indian Express, 15/12/22

India 3rd largest solar mkt globally in 2018

Top 10 Cos Account For 60% Of Projects

India emerged as the third largest solar PV (photo-voltaic) market in the world, with the country’s top 10 companies accounting for over 60% of all large-scale project installations in 2018 calendar year. According to green energy market tracker Mercom Capital’s latest report, India installed 8.3 GW (gigawatt) of solar PV capacity in 2018 against 44.3 GW by China and 10.6 by the US. Japan and Germany trailed India to the fourth and fifth-largest solar markets in the world. The report said there were over 300 utility-scale project developers in India with projects of at least 5 MW or more in operation. Currently, there are around 80 large-scale project developers with a pipeline of 5 MW (mega watt) or more in India. “Much has changed in the Indian solar industry over the last year. There was some re-shuffling when it came to suppliers after the imposition of the safeguard duty, while others have consolidated their positions,” Mercom Capital Raj Prabhu said. ACME Solar was the top developer in terms of utilityscale solar installations in 2018. It also had the largest project pipeline at the end of the year, closely followed by SB Energy (SoftBank) and Azure Power. The Adani group maintained its position as the largest project developer in terms of total cumulative installations through the end of 2018. It was also the second largest utility-scale solar installer in 2018. CleanMax Solar emerged as the top rooftop solar installer in 2018, followed by Fourth Partner Energy, whereas Tata Power still has the largest cumulative installations in the solar rooftop segment. The report said the top 10 rooftop solar installers covered just 30% of installed capacity in India in 2018. Other rooftop developers constituted 70% of the market. In the EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) segment, Sterling and Wilson emerged as the top player


Source: Times of India, 9/04/2019

An agenda for energy

India needs to bring structural changes, reset targets, influence global policy and choices.

You need energy to grow. This is as true for economies as it is for humans. Whether it is the use of machines in a factory, appliances like washing machines and refrigerators in households that help save time on chores, or automobiles to move people and goods faster, energy is needed to grow output. Even the use of materials like metals, plastics, chemicals, bricks and cement, without which a decent quality of life is now hard to imagine, means use of more energy: The production of steel accounts for nearly 9 per cent of India’s total energy needs, and brick-making is the second largest industrial use of energy. Put simply, an un-electrified house with mud walls and a thatched roof only needs manual energy to build, but a brick-and-cement house needs much more. Energy consumption per person for a country is correlated to its average output per person.

Higher productivity also needs denser energy. Grass, for example, has lower energy density than cooking gas: Cooking a bowl of rice by burning straws would take a lot more time than by using a gas cylinder. While traditional societies across the world all relied on biomass (that is, sources like firewood and crop residue, which are less-dense), their growth in productivity was associated with a move to denser fuels: Imagine running a car directly with coal or wheat-straw. It is said that the transition of the fuel for ships from the less-dense coal to the higher-density oil contributed to the success of the British navy in the First World War. In the early 1990s, biomass was 30 per cent of China’s energy, but is only 5 per cent now. India’s ratio currently is 30 per cent, but should start to fall as household electrification picks up, and government policy raises the penetration of cooking gas cylinders.

So, the Indian economy’s energy needs will rise with growth, and demand for denser energy sources will grow even faster. Between 2000 and 2015, when India’s output (as measured by GDP) grew at 7 per cent a year, its energy demand grew at 4.5 per cent a year, implying that efficiency of energy use improved at about 2.5 per cent annually. The problem was that the annual growth in domestic production of energy was only 3 per cent, and imports therefore had to grow at 8.5 per cent to meet the demand. The share of energy needs met through imports rose from 21 per cent in 2000 to 36 per cent by 2015. If similar trends persist, we estimate that nearly half of the demand in 2040 would be met by imports. The main constraint in India is the lack of reserves of oil, gas and metallurgical coal (used for steel-making), but poor management of what India does have is also a reason.

Importing large amounts of energy is by itself not a problem (except possibly for security reasons — one can imagine the problems of this vulnerability in times of war). But how does one pay for it? The energy import bill this year is already at a record high of $125 billion, despite energy prices being half of what they were at the peak a decade back: Volume growth has more than offset the price decline. Three years from now, even if the recent surge in prices reverses, the value of energy imports would be nearly $40 billion higher than this year. By 2040, even with minimal price growth, the import bill could be $660 billion. As a share of national income, this will most likely be a manageably low number, but the constraint would be in getting that quantum of dollars.

The recent troubles for the currency have originated from slowing foreign capital inflows coinciding with rising energy prices: Capital inflows as a share of GDP this year have fallen to 2002 levels, and paying for imports has become a struggle. Only part of this decline is cyclical: That is, it may pick up over time without any policy level changes; the rest may need policy changes. The necessary dollars can also come from exports, but export growth has slowed too, particularly for services: A decade back, rapid growth in these had prevented the external balances from deteriorating during the oil price spike.

The fact that India may struggle to pay for the energy it needs to grow the economy at even 7 per cent a year is concerning, and challenges the widely held view that 8 per cent growth is just around the corner. Structural changes on several fronts may be necessary to overcome these hurdles: Improve capital inflows, grow domestic energy production, increase energy efficiency, and also accelerate the transition to more domestic sources of energy.

Of high priority should be freeing up energy pricing, not just in electricity but also coal and gas. Controlled and distorted pricing drives inefficiency in usage, and also inhibits a supply response at times like now, when rupee depreciation has made domestic energy so much cheaper than imported energy. The legal monopoly of Coal India on merchant mining of coal was unwound a few years back, but no licences have been issued yet to private enterprises. The country also needs to collectively move away from carting its low-grade coal over hundreds of kilometres instead of moving power, which is cheaper, easier and less wasteful: This would need national-level planning.

The ambition on solar and wind power may need to be reset substantially upwards: Even if solar and wind capacity reaches 650 Gigawatts by 2040 (a nine-fold increase from now), they would only be able to cater to 4 per cent of India’s energy needs that year. Given the scale of required capacity, self-sufficiency in such equipment should also be sought. Further, given the natural fluctuations in output from renewable sources, the grid would need to be re-planned/architected. India also needs to accelerate electrification of various energy-guzzlers. Electric vehicles are expected to be just 6 per cent of cars globally by 2030: This may be too slow for Indian requirements.

India is expected to drive almost a fourth of global energy demand in the next two decades. Not only should it be pulling its weight on global forums and influence global policy and choices (something that is beginning to happen), there needs to be significant investment in India-specific solutions: The country’s medium-term growth potential could otherwise be at risk.

Source: Indian Express, 23/10/2018