India's Energy-Transport Matrix

The entire month of June I was in New Delhi attending a month long fellowship on India's environmental concerns organized by the Center for Science and Environment titled Agenda for Survival. This post as well as various following posts are going to be about certain interesting leanings from the course.

The key message of the matrix is, to shift towards sustainable practices and simultaneously avoid future emissions.

India's Integrated Energy Policy, 2006 frames an analysis considering India's growth at 8-10% annually. Such growth calls for an increase in India's electricity supply six fold to meet Millennium Development Goals. This also means an increase in primary energy supply four fold. Now if coal is going to be the primary energy source in India till 2030, there is an urgent need to understand and shift to renewable sources of energy. India also happens to import nearly 75% of its crude oil energy. The transport part of the matrix comes in at this point.

The Matrix?

What do we do to make our cars more fuel efficient?

In India, the automobile industry is trying to buy itself time. This time would delay the switch from Bharat Stage IV to V and further improved standards, the equivalent to Euro auto emission standards. This is being done as auto car manufacturers have other better concerns.

The possibility of greening current fleet of vehicles on roads is very high. This is the understanding - All auto companies follow the law of the land. Thus, same car in two different countries would have separate fuel economies. Indian auto manufacturers do sell else where around the world. At this point they must follow the standards set on foreign land. Though the companies are not interested in being philanthropic.

Getting back directly to the point of coal manufacturing. Cars in India, are the second largest users of diesel. Even if there is an increase in large cars running on diesel by 10% in India, it would lead to disastrous irreversible effects. Solutions such as bio fuels from cellulose can reduce green house gasses by 50-80% . Yet bio fuels require large amounts of land, threat to agricultural production and create concerns of food security. Solar power costs Rs. 20 per kilo watt and hour of energy. Creating market for solar power would reduce prices and cost on the buyers end, this is a smart thing to do.

The facts are before us, life cycle assessment could prove resourceful in such a case. Though, we must realize that our dependency on coal power must be minimized and this is urgent.