Thursday, August 13, 2009

Why India Needs to Look at Renewable Energy RIGHT NOW

Treehugger has this sad piece that speaks about how bad things are in India and how much worse they are getting, environmentally speaking: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/08/india-carbon-emissions-land-degradation-increase-groundwater-declines.php While there are some positive attempts being undertaken at growing more trees etc, the country's huge demand for energy to power gadgets for an increasingly wealthy population has caused more than a few problems. India is building more and more coal fired powrplants - the NLC complex at Neyveli seems to come out with new tenders for mroe and more large coal fired powerplants by the day. And huge quantities of coal get imported from Australia, Indonesia etc. The coal burning plants need water ajnd this drains the country's already meager supply of clean water. This forces the people to draw ground water for drinking, washing, agriculture etc and depletes ground water supply.

As visitors here know, wind turbines do not require water to be drawn, greatly reducing the quantity of water used up because of its use in power generation. And, the use of solar water heaters, as is mandatory in some parts of India, could help significantly in reducing power consumption from those filthy coal-burning powerplants by redcing the amount of electricity that is used, reducing the use of water even further. A win-win situation? Of course! And, best of all, one that shows fossil fuel the fist!

3 comments:

mehulkamdar said...

Just received a very disturbing link from Dr Mayraj Fahim: http://news.rediff.com/slide-show/2009/aug/10/slide-show-1-interview-the-poor-pay-more-for-water-than-the-rich.htm

Just goes to show the enormity of the water crisis in India. Someone had better hurry up in Delhi and come up with some concrete solutions.

Mohanakrishnan B said...

Mehul
There is an excellent article in Value Research magazine by Sanjeev Pandya which endorses everything that you say about renewable energy. It should be appearing in the online archives at www.valueresearchonline.com sometime towards the end of this month or the first week of September.Hopefully it will cause the investment fraternity to realise the gravity of the situation that faces us and cause them to lobby hard for change. If they dont they might not be a world to invest in at some point of time. No point in having money if you cant buy anything with it. Farmers in some parts of Andhra Pradesh are spending upto INR 2000 a day to buy water in a desperate attempt to save their crops. The contractor brings the water upto the side of the road and the whole family works to carry it in buckets to their field. They are already in debt due to various reasons and are forced to borrow more to irrigate their fields. That or lose their crops. Recently Times of India exposed the quality of drinking water in Chennai Egmore Railway Station which reportedly contained faecal matter to the extent of 60%. As usual only the blame game is played with the railways passing the buck to metrowater and vice-versa.

mehulkamdar said...

Thanks for this response, Mohan, though the news itself is singularly bad. I really have no idea when Indians are going to wake up to the enormity of problems that face the country from an environmental perspective - this is not an easy problem to tackle except by going green. And though there is lip service being paid to the whole issue, little else is really being done.

Sad, and I hope that things were different . . .