India is dependent on coal-fed power plants for the country’s power supply. The constant power shortages due to insufficient coal supply has prompted the country to switch to solar energy. India has been suffering from power shortage for the past six years due to shortage in the supply of coal. Power producers had to rely on more expensive imports just to deliver power to consumers. Several millions of Indian households are lucky to have power for a few hours each day, and more than 300 million homes are still without power.
Opportune moment
The escalating power shortage seems headed in the direction of a crisis. However, rather than allowing a disaster to happen, authorities are turning this into an overhaul of energy production.
India, just like other developing nations, is reliant on coal as its main energy source because coal is cheap. The country has set aside the problems of global warming and pollution because the demand for electricity is getting higher. Many industries are getting established and Indian cities are rapidly expanding.
Solar power
After almost zero presence of solar power in India, it now has an additional 2.2 gigawatts of solar energy added to its electricity grid. This is enough to provide power to 20 million homes. That was three years ago. The country’s power supplier plans to add 2 gigawatts more this year, leading to a total of 15-gigawatt production by 2017. The different states in India also plan to increase their own solar energy production. Currently coal-fired plants are producing an additional 26 GW since 2011 but the plants are getting idle one by one due to insufficient supply of coal.
The chairman of Hindustan Power Projects Ltd., Ratul Puri said that his company no longer plans to build coal plants because imported coal is more expensive and the venture is riskier. Instead, the company is going to invest close to $3 billion to expand its solar power generation from 350 megawatts today to about one gigawatt in 2017.
Coal power versus solar power
While it will take some time before solar power generation completely takes the majority share in energy production in the country, it is making headway. Although dependence on coal was due to it being cheaper, the coal sources in India are almost exhausted. Moreover, the price of solar electricity is now down, and is almost on the same level as electricity produced by the coal-fed plants due to subsidy. Price per kilowatt hour of solar power is 7 rupees, compared to 5-6 rupees per kilowatt hour of coal power.
There are other positive factors that work in favor of harnessing solar energy. For one thing, less clearances are needed by plant owners. Likewise, it only takes about 6 to 12 months to develop a solar energy plant compared to 8 years for a coal-fired plant to be established.
With these latest developments, analysts are predicting that India will even surpass their solar energy production target by 15% by year 2022.
Photo credit: Taken by Challiyan under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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