Very Positive News From India, Though Implementation Will be the Key

As someone who has been vocally critical about the lack of attention towards Renewable Energy in India and towards Solar Energy in particular, I am glad to say that I have reason to celebrate today. After the small steps taken by the State Governments of Haryana, Karnataka and by municipalities in Maharashtra, news comes in today vide The Hindu about a massive Central Government plan to make India a global leader in solar energy generation: http://www.hindu.com/2009/04/26/stories/2009042660422200.htm

There are few countries in the world that have India's potential as far as solar energy is concerned. Some of the most pleasant climate in the world and almost 325 -plus days of sunshine across the country make it a most sensible exercise to look at this abundant resource and use it to generate power and to warn water for the use of the Indian people, not to forget the fact that this is bound to reduce the huge amounts of foreign exchange that India sends out to import coal and crude oil. After some so-called "experts" came up with idiotic pronouncements about solar energy in the recent past, I was personally disillusioned about what was happening, though this is fantastic news to say the least. I guess it had to happen - there might be the odd idiot but there are vastly more educated and concerned individuals in the country.

That said, I would like to stress that this positive beginning will take hard work as far as implementation is concerned. I have always been supportive of Indian tax support for renewable energy products - this is even better. India has huge amounts of foreign aid as well as governmental funds available for various projects. A careful focus on this new Solar Mission can only save billions in foreign exchange and also clean the country's air up. Let us not forget that India was one of the world's pioneers in harnessing wind power, at a time when the country was poor and foreign exchange was a scarce commodity. With some of the world's best engineers and with money available now, there is no reason why, with some effort, the country cannot become a solar energy powerhouse.

I see several advantages in this apart form savings in foreign exchange, reduced pollution, and this blog's all-important aim of showing fossil fuels the fist:

1. Increased employment from training lakhs of new workers in installing and servicing solar systems

2. Increased secondary employment from transportation, marketing, billing and other office services for businesses that will become involved in this field

3. More research and development leading to this sector advancing faster and innovation bringing better products by the day

4. Better foreign exchange earnings - make no mistake: a huge market like India will require more and more companies to set up manufacturing facilities in the country and then to export them from India. If Hyundai does this for cars, take it from me - manufacturers of solar systems will do the same as well

5. Reduced spending on healthcare as pollution drops. People who are less sick will automatically save more money as they will not have to spend it on medical treatment

And the list could go on . . . right now, I am not going to think about making it longer. I need to celebrate.

Excellent Article on Green Building Basics

While there is a lot of greenwashing that takes place these days in the rush by some corrupt businesses to capitalize on the popularity of the green movement, ("greenwashing" being just a polite term for bullshitting) the fact is that it is quite easy to go green whether this refers to how someone lives or how they build their homes. How Stuff Works, the Discovery Channel's popular show and website has an excellent series of articles on the subject at: http://home.howstuffworks.com/home-improvement/energy-efficiency/green-building.htm

Hopefully, this should give those who want this information in simple and uncomplicated language something to enjoy reading and then implement in their lives. Thanks, Treehugger, for the link to your sister website!

A Very Interesting New Technology that Could Make Rice Husk and Other Vegetable Waste A Very Useful Raw Material

One way of making homes energy efficient is to insulate them properly. This reduces the amount of energy required for heating as well as for cooling and reduced pressure on heaters and air conditioners means reduced costs and less strain on the environment especially when the bulk of the electricity that we use comes from fossil fuel sources. The New York Times's Green Inc Blog has this very interesting piece about a company that uses fungi, agricultural waste and a type of naturally occuring mineral to manufacture an advanced insulating material: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/using-fungi-to-replace-styrofoam/

In India, for some time now, rice husk has either been used to make cheap paper, as feed for mushrooms in the few places where they are cultivated for export or burned either in biofuel based powerplants or in the open air for festivities like Bhogi / Sankaranti. My feeling is that this new technology, if licensed and used in South Asia, would offer significantly more value addition than any of the other uses talked about so far as to make this a very viable project. And, if the insulating material were used in homes, it would make them vastly mroe efficient than what is available in that part of the world right now. In the USA this is used as a substitute for Styrofoam. Homes in South Asia do not use styrofoam and are utterly inefficient as far as insulation is concerned. There is potential here - will anyone rise to the challenge? If someone wants to do this, Evocative Design's website is: http://www.ecovativedesign.com/

India's Water Mess - A Sign of the Disaster in the Making as Chhatisgarh Farmers Commit Mass Suicide

I am grateful to Dr Mayraj Fahim for the main article here as well as other pieces referenced later on in this post. This blog is about Renewable Energy but I have focused on grain storage and water conservation in the past - indeed, my interest in water conservation is one of the reasons why I personally believe that wind energy is an important way forward as far as energy is concerned. Wind turbines do not need water for cooling, making them a superb way of generating electricity in a clean manner and without using water which is already a scarce resource in several parts of India. Ask me - I grew up in Madras and while I lived with my parents at the government owned Old Tower Block, I never had to worry about water. The government keeps its own happy. The hassles came when I got married and left home - the only reason why we had water on a daily basis at Gowri Chitra Gardens where my wife and I lived before we came to the USA is that the building implemented rain water harvesting long before it became fashionable. On the flip side, in the poor state of Chhatisgarh, several farmers have committed suicide because they have run out of ground water as this article shows: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/1500-farmers-commit-mass-suicide-in-india-1669018.html This is news that you will not see in the Indian newspapers. They are too busy lying about how great life is in India. What are some dead poor farmers in Chhatisgarh when there is India Fashion Week waiting to be covered in Mumbai, with a dinner with some nubile models thrown in?

I have also talked about the fraud being committed in India not going in for a modern grain storage system both on this blog as well as in articles in the Indian media. NABARD has had over $ 200 million in funding available from Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau and the Swiss Development Corporation for non-farm sector loans for over 20 years as far as I know. I had arranged for an expert to talk to the Ministry for Agriculture in New Delhi when the current government had just been elected five years ago on this subject, without pushing any particular company or agenda. They took the information that I had arranged and did nothing. That is the Indian way - farmers commit suicide when they are in debt and pests eat three times the amount of grain that people do in India. The poor die of starvation but the Ministry of Agriculture will not implement an old plan of setting up co-operatives to run grain storage businesses and rent them to the FCI with shares given to farmers so that they have an income during lean times, and the silos actually save tens of thousands of grain. What was it about Nero playing the harp while Rome burned? India has thousands of Neros working simultaneously and in co-operation while Indians die of starvation. This country is a basket case. Make no bones about it. The following links show you exactly why:

1. http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/04/indias-green-revolution-heading-for.html India's Green Revolution is Heading for Collapse

2. http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/04/usdas-india-estimates-are-bogus.html A US blogger explains why the USDA's India estimates for a 2009 wheat crop are bogus

3. http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/04/india-will-be-importing-millions-of.html This is what happens when wheat crops fail - the country is forced to import wheat. And more farmers will commit suicide . . .

Some Cautious Forward Movement on Solar Energy in the USA

I am grateful to Dr Mayraj Fahim for this article on Alternet http://www.alternet.org/environment/136152?page=entire which describes the potential gains as well as risks that face entrepreneurs in the field of solar energy in the USA. There is one factor that the author of the article is possibly not sure off which I must mention here - rapid competition in advancing the field of solar photovoltaic power is bringing down the costs of manufacturing solar photovoltaic panels and efficiency is being pushed up every few months by new developments as companies and universities around the world take up the challenge of making solar cells more efficient and cheap. This is a fact that is known to the entrepreneurs who are involved in this industry and that is why people in Germany are happy to put their money into ventures in this field.

There is considerable movement in the field of renewable energy and if there is any disappointment, as far as I am concerned, it is in the fact that South Asia is not looking at this with the same degree of seriousness that the West is. With India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka etc bathed in sunlight around the year, just imagine the potential . . . But then, I would be repeating myself like a scratched record if I go on now.

Green Advocates Begin Talking About Sailships

Visitors to this blog would know that I am, personally, obsessed with the idea of transporting goods by sea, and by sailships in particular. Treehugger and Low Tech Magazine, both blogs that I subscribe to and which can be accessed through the reading lists here, have taken up the cause as the following posts indicate: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/slow-freight-wind-powered-transport.php and http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/slow-freight-goes-high-tech.php Low Tech Mag's original story that sparked this discussion is: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/04/cargo-ships-then-and-now.html

Those who have their own views on this subject, are welcome to post there. I hope someone with an entrepreneurial bent thinks about this and does something like start a shipping business with sailships . . .

Air India Follows Emirates in Saving Fuel

After a dispute with Air India (where the consumer courts ruled in my favor) many years ago, I swore never to use that airline and I am convinced thhat I did the right thing. Recently, when my mother in law visited Chicago, I told the jokers at their counter that I never traveled in their miserable apology of an airline and that I never would. My mother in law is a masochist - no one who isn't one, would want to spend their own money to travel on this airline, in my opinion. But then, as my late grandmother used to say, you could find something useful even in a dead snake if you tried. Treehugger has this post about Air India saving fuel: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/air-india-fuel-efficiency-efforts-save-9-million-dollars-in-six-months.php

Considering that the jokers who run this Indian public sector farce have been living on handouts from the Central Government for decades, this must be one way the management is trying to keep this airline afloat. I guess, from the viewpoint of this blog, it saves fossil fuel from being burned and polluting the atmosphere - Air India have to be acknowledged for showing fossil fuel the fist. That said, Emirates, probably the best international airline these days, have a much bigger program than Air India's and they were there even earlier. With considerably more planes than Air India can even dream about buying, they do a much bigger job of saving fuel.