Powering net zero

The agricultural sector is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in India, at 37%, followed by the electricity sector at 27%. These top two sectors must be tackled urgently to accelerate India’s net zero goal. Nowhere are India’s economic ambitions and the acceleration of net zero as aligned and linked as in the electricity sector. 

All countries with a Human Development Index (a measure of quality of life) above 0.9 consume at least four times as much energy per capita as Indians. As former fossil fuel functions such as transportation and building heat are electrified, electricity demand will increase further.

The upcoming Cross-Border Adjustment Mechanism will require emissions reporting for all goods and services that are imported and exported, making Indian goods uncompetitive if manufactured with a high carbon footprint. Access to clean, abundant, and affordable clean electricity will be a key determinant of India’s future in more ways than one.

Presently, about 70% of India’s electricity supply relies on coal (44%) and oil (25%). There is an ongoing effort to stop building new coal-fired power plants and to ramp up wind and solar electricity production. The good news is that wind and solar are the least expensive ways of generating electricity practically anywhere in the world.

Over the last three decades, the cost of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries has been on an exponential decline with an impressive learning rate. The learning rate is defined as the percentage reduction in cost for every doubling of production volume. Production volumes for these technologies have doubled rapidly for decades and will continue to do so. Thus, the simple economics of continued cost declines will grease this transition to clean energy.

Accelerating India’s net zero requires a massive build-out of onshore wind, offshore wind, solar farms, and energy storage. This growth must take into account four constraints. First, the wind doesn’t blow all the time, and the sun certainly doesn’t shine at night or on cloudy days. We need to make the electrical grid stable at all times, even with intermittent energy sources. Second, renewable energy is often produced far away from population centres. We must invest in transmission systems to have a high-capacity nationwide corridor for the transport of green electrons. Third, new cleantech jobs will eclipse those lost in the coal sector. We need to provide training and job opportunities for those who are displaced. Finally, this massive investment in the electrical system is the right time to make sure we carry out a just transition in which abundant energy, good jobs, and concomitant economic benefits are prioritised for those people and regions who need them most.

We do not see a major role for nuclear energy in this future mix, primarily due to uncompetitive economics and unsolved problems of nuclear waste and safety risks. Small modular nuclear efforts in China and the US have yet to prove tangible benefits from economies of scale.

Our electrical grids must undergo a profound evolution to support this transformation. For society to shift all its transportation and cooking to electricity, our grids must achieve world-class metrics in system- and customer-level availability.
The management of grids with intermittent energy supplies is complex and requires digital grid management that balances energy inflows and outflows minute-by-minute, taking into account accurate weather and demand forecasts.

Studies have shown that a highly reliable electrical grid based mostly or solely on wind, solar, and batteries is possible. System-wide costs are minimised by building electrical generation capacity much higher than peak demand. On days when wind and sunshine are scarce, the installed capacity and battery storage will satisfy demand, while on the remaining days, we will have abundant cheap “superpower” available.

This excess power can be used to make hydrogen, run compute-intensive data centre operations, or schedule power-intensive manufacturing. It is not inconceivable that electricity will be available at Rs 1 per kWh (or unit) during off-peak periods, a veritable boon to industry!

With careful attention to agriculture and the electricity sector, India can cut harmful emissions in half in this decade. How do we get to net zero from there? Should we even try? Watch this space.

(Visweswariah is VP, cure100.org, and Muralidharan is an R&D specialist, IIT Madras. This is the fifth in a series of seven articles on the topic of
climate change and net zero)