Greening off-grid power in rural India

There is a huge market for solar power in rural India, and the industry is experiencing an unprecedented boom. I'm going to write a series of posts that discuss the renewable revolution currently occurring in rural India, specifically the shift to solar power. In this post I'm going to look at the background of solar power in India and identify some of the reasons that explain why it has such potential looking to the future.

©flickr/BMitchener

Rapid industrialisation and rising standards of living have led to a rise in power consumption across the country. India currently has 27,000 MW of renewable energy capacity (12% of the country’s total power capacity [1]), of which solar energy is the most efficient and cost-effective renewable source. The recent growth of the solar power sector has been largely put down to the rising cost of conventional power in India and a decline in the cost of solar technology globally, as outlined in my last post. In India conventional energy generation usually takes the form of burning cheap locally-sourced coal, but in recent years it has proved difficult to access sufficient local reserves and power companies have been forced to import coal, which is obviously more expensive, leading to rising prices. This has meant solar has increasingly been seen as an efficient, economically feasible alternative, and in several Indian states grid parity has already been reached, without subsidisation.

The Indian government has set a target for 20,000MW of installed solar generation by 2022, from an installed grid-interactive capacity of around 2,079MW currently [2]. Beyond grid-interactive systems, the government has also been making efforts to expand solar generation in off-grid rural areas as part of its Jawaharlal Nehru NationalSolar Mission (JNNSM), and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has been implementing a Remote Village Electrification Programme, which provides support for electrifying remote villages and hamlets by installing local renewable generation systems in areas where grid extension is not feasible or cost-effective. In these rural areas, demand for solar is at a peak.

©flickr/Engineering for Change

Here, nearly 85% of households continue to use biomass as the primary source of fuel for cooking, especially firewood (62.5%), crop residue (12.3%) and cow dung (10.9%), according to the 2011 National Census. These biomass fuels are inefficient and release a multitude of dangerous air pollutants when burned [3]. The use of firewood and biomass as fuel for cooking and heating is known to be the main cause of indoor and outdoor air pollution in rural India. Studies have shown that women exposed to biofuels smoke during cooking suffer from more health problems (Sukhsohale et al., 2013). Recent evidence from The Energy and Resource Institute in India (TERI) and All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) determines that each year 100,120 deaths of children under five can be attributed to indoor air pollution in India. Exposure to indoor air pollution is associated with various respiratory illnesses, lung cancer, cataracts, low birth weight and pulmonary tuberculosis (Gall et al., 2013; Gautam et al., 2013). An obvious way to prevent morbidity related to indoor air pollution is to encourage the use of alternative, and clean, sources of fuel, such as solar energy.

Solar power is fast becoming the answer to rural India’s energy problems, and the potential is enormous. In some areas, such as rural Bihar, less than a tenth of households use electricity for lighting, according to the national census. It is in areas like this where the greatest opportunity lies, as the absence of grid power means there is no pre-existing dependence on electricity infrastructure that relies on non-renewable resources. In rural India there is the chance to introduce cheap, efficient and renewable energy to vast areas where alternative sources are entirely inadequate already, and institutional or cultural patterns of unsustainable energy consumption have not yet been established. Khare et al. (2013) note that, in India, wind and solar energy are “omnipresent, freely available and environment friendly…the combined utilization of these renewable energy sources is therefore becoming increasingly attractive and is being widely used as an alternative for oil-produced energy”. In a landscape where grid-generated energy is inefficient and inaccessible, and firewood/biomass burning is having a severe impact on human health and the wider environment, cheap solar technology allows the development of widely-distributed generating systems that can be accessed in small concentrations by local, remote communities efficiently and cleanly.

[1] Coal-fired power plants account for 56% of India’s total power capacity, hydropower accounts for 19%, natural gas 9% and renewable energy 12% (Khare et al., 2013).

[2] It is easy to see how this official target could actually be surpassed considering the enormous growth in installed solar capacity in recent years. Besides which, 20,000MW of installed solar generation would still only make up less than 5% of total power generation in India (predicted to be 400GW by 2022).

[3] According to this paper on indoor air pollution by the Indian Council of Medical Research (2001), the range of pollutants released during biomass burning can include suspended particulate matter, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, sulphur, trace metals and polycyclic organic matter (including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the majority of which are possible carcinogens).