India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, once called big dams the “Temples of modern India.” If he were alive today, he might call India’s numerous wind parks the wings for India’s future.
Economically as well as ecologically, a new energy policy for India is needed. India has a peak shortage of 12% in spite of billions of rupees pumped into the state-owned power sector, and economic growth of around 8% is adding new pressure every year. Demand is rising from a growing middle class and flourishing industries. In 2002, the New Delhi central government announced the ambitious target of nearly doubling the presently installed capacity of about 118,000 MW by 2012.
With more than half of India’s energy coming from dirty coal, the nation has become one of the world’s big climate killers and now ranks fourth in greenhouse gas emissions. The decision by the government in 1992 to set up a Ministry for Non-conventional Energy (MNES) to strengthen renewables was hailed by many environmentalists as the breakthrough toward a safe, clean and green energy future. Various subsidies and incentives were offered to kickstart a wind revolution, especially for private-sector investors.
The states of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu pioneered wind energy, and today boast of the biggest wind parks. Both benefited from wind-friendly terrain – vast areas with strong winds during the monsoon – and from a well-developed infrastructure. Tamil Nadu’s Muppandal region, for example, near the southern tip of the subcontinent, has several thousand turbines with an aggregate wind power capacity of 540 MW in an area covering 60,000 acres. Maharashtra introduced special tariffs for “green energy,” determined by the Regulatory Commission and guaranteeing investors a 16% return on equity. Independent Power Producers (IPP) and manufacturers of equipment have started to run windparks for private investors.
As a result, installed capacity increased tremendously. In 2005 alone it grew by nearly 50%, to 4,434 MW, more than half of it in Tamil Nadu alone. India became the fourth largest wind energy power after Germany, Spain and the US. Wind energy has overtaken India’s nuclear power generation, which according to the Nuclear Power Corporation website has a capacity of 2,710 MW. The nation’s wind potential is currently estimated at up to 45,000 MW, which is expected to increase with improved technology.
The policy also kick-started the development of an indigenous industry. Indian manufacturers of towers, blades, generators and gear boxes have full order-books. To attract customers, manufacturers offer turnkey projects and complete after-sales services and management. All the big players – including Enercon, Vestas, GE Wind – now have at least a foothold in India, and most of them are expanding their production facilities. The Indian company Suzlon is now one of the top 10 manufacturers in the world, setting up offices and production facilities in China and elsewhere.
Challenges and concerns
Although wind energy is much less problematic than thermal, big hydro and nuclear energy, it also has some drawbacks in India. First, the power actually generated is limited by periods of low wind speeds. In Maharashtra, for example, the windy season is mainly restricted to the monsoon, from mid-May to mid-September. In Tamil Nadu, wind energy accounts for 26% of installed capacity, yet contributes only 5% to generation.
India’s wind boom has also done little to bring energy to the rural poor. Power from the big wind farms flows into the grid and on to cities and industries. The millions of poor now without modern electricity services would benefit from decentralised minigrids fed by a mix of renewable, locally available energy sources like biomass, small windmills, solar and micro-hydro. It is to be hoped that the central government’s proposal for such a program will be as successful as the wind energy development program, though it is hard to imagine it will be adequately fueled by the private sector’s profit motive, which is the model for the wind program.
Another problem is the availability of suitable locations. Areas with sufficient wind speeds and easy access are becoming scarce. Land prices are skyrocketing – in Tamil Nadu, for example, land costs have increased 20 times and more in the last few years. Poorer communities like toddy tappers, herdsmen, or marginal farmers have been further marginalised, losing access to land and other means of livelihood. This pressure on land and prices will increase when the demand for investment opportunities by private capital and manufacturers, who have to offer locations to their clients, increases further. More farmers will be tempted to sell valuable agricultural land to the more productive use of harvesting the wind.
inally, in spite of a ministry devoted to non-conventional energies and some well aid-out policies and economic incentives to foster wind energy as an attractive commercial renewable, there has hardly been a turnaround in the energy policy. Of the planned 62,000 MW in additional conventional energy sources to be added by 2012, 38,000 MW would come from coal-based projects, 16,000 MW from hydro, 6,000 MW from gas/LNG and 3,000 MW from nuclear, according to the Business Standard (Feb. 27, 2006). By comparison, the aim of increasing renewables to 12,000 MW by 2012 pales in significance.
Compared to the subsidies and public investments into thermal, hydro and nuclear, the success of wind energy has come at a low price for the public exchequer. Direct subsidies and fiscal incentives are slowly being reduced. G.M. Pillai, director general of the Maharashtra Energy Development Agency, said two years ago, “Wind power should be fully viable in the next three to four years. In fact it might be cheaper than other sources,” because of falling capital costs and improving efficiency with advancing technology.
If India wants to establish itself as a clean energy leader, it will need to shift these numbers so that wind and other renewables are a larger slice of the pie, with a commensurate shrinking in the coal and large-hydro segments. (Third World Network Features)
The foregoing article first appeared in World Rivers Review, December 2006.
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