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Chasing the Solar Unicorn

01 Tue Dec 2015

Posted by in India, South Asia

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Great headlines do not necessarily make for great policy. The announcement of the Solar Alliance by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President François Hollande on the opening day of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris certainly fits the bill. The aim of this alliance of 121 countries, including the United States and China, is to mobilise $1 trillion dollars by 2030 to fund solar energy throughout the world. Each member of the alliance will also strive to reduce the cost of financing for solar projects within its realm and support development of solar technology around the world.

For India’s part, Modi has pledged $30 million to build, host, and support the headquarters of the International Agency for Solar Technologies and Applications (IASTA) for five years. Modi also committed India to installing 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022, of which 100 GW will be solar power. The economy of scale, the government hopes, will drive down prices and make the power of the sun affordable to India’s teeming millions. International cooperation, greater economies of scale and shared technological development should remedy the shortcomings of solar power eventually.

In principle, this is not a bad policy; any move away from fossil fuel must be applauded. However, there are severe limitations to solar power that are yet to be addressed and India’s wholesale embrace of a technology that might not give the best bang for the buck is worrisome. Worse, Modi seems to have put all his eggs in one renewables basket that he wishes to grow to 40 per cent of the total energy mix by 2030. At present, this seems like little more than chasing the solar unicorn.

Network engineers classify power consumption into two broad categories – baseload, which is the minimum amount of power that is needed at any time of the day, and peak power, which is the maximum amount of power needed at certain specific times of the day. One problem that restricts solar energy from becoming the primary source of baseload power is that it is intermittent. This means that it comes and goes according to nature’s rhythms and and does not quite fit the pattern of a normal human workday. Solar power may help meet peak demand if the requirement coincides with a clear and sunny afternoon. With a heavy emphasis on solar power expansion, India would be hitching its electricity generation, and by implication, economic growth, to the vagaries of nature. Germany’s Energiewende has shown that excessive dependence on renewable energy has raised the cost of electricity to consumers as well as increased reliance on coal and gas power plants for backup for when the sun is not shining. As a result, Germany’s green solution is looking rather brown.

Solar enthusiasts recommend energy storage systems to overcome its questionable reliability. If energy can be stored whenever it is generated and drawn when it is needed, surely solar power can serve as another baseload contributor. This sounds good in theory but fails in practice. There is, as yet, no viable energy storage device for a single home, let alone across entire grids. Lead-acid batteries have efficiency and environmental issues but even opting for the more expensive and recyclable lithium ion batteries provides little solution: just to compare numbers and put matters in perspective, the world’s annual production of Li-ion batteries stood around 8.3 GWh in 2014; India’s energy consumption that year was slightly over 1.1 million GWh.

There are also some serious questions about material availability. Some 95 per cent of the world’s lithium is found in Bolivia, Chile, China, the United States, Argentina, and Australia. Mining sufficient volumes would present a challenge but not an insurmountable one. If Li-ion batteries took off, this concentration of suppliers could create its own geopolitical problems not dissimilar to today’s petropolitics. To be fair, however, the recyclability of lithium would prevent it from becoming as amoral.

The efficiency of solar panels is another concern. Most solar panels have a rating of approximately 20 per cent and a lifespan of 20 years. Each year, the panels lose about a percentage point in their efficiency. To generate the sort of power that India would need – 1.25 billion (and counting) people with GDP growth between 8 and 10 per cent – vast tracts of land would be required despite India’s more fortunate insolation.

The difficulties over land acquisition in India are well known, and if solar farms are moved into desolate areas to circumvent legal entanglements, the cost of both, their maintenance and transmission, would be higher. Furthermore, the impact of utility-scale solar power on land is not favourable and low-quality locations such as barren land or abandoned mining sites would have to be used to minimise ecological impact. The amount of land required should also give the government some pause. Even the most advanced solar panels remain inefficient and to generate the same amount of power a nuclear plant can on a 400-acre site will require land more by at least an order of magnitude.

Solar panels need water to keep them clean. Photo voltaic cells are not friendly to dust, grime, or rain and deteriorate over time. Dirt reduces the already low efficiency of solar panels. Ironically, some of the site most suited to solar farms like Rajasthan, north-west Gujarat, central Maharashtra, western Andhra Pradesh, and northern Karnataka are also some of the drier regions of the country. In a country where even agriculture flounders because of a slightly delayed monsoon, it seems unlikely that solar panels will have the priority over water use.

Whom does a national solar strategy benefit? Presently, the solar power market in India is dominated by Chinese companies. Despite distance and logistics favouring them, Indian manufacturers cannot match the price quoted by their Chinese competitors. Petitioned by local business, the government considered anti-dumping duties and reluctantly imposed them after a time but the World Trade Organisation recently disagreed with India’s claims and forbade such measures. With the construction of a 100 GW capacity in play, one wonders if it is China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and the United States that will benefit or Make in India. The flip side to this conundrum, of course, is the environmental cost of polysilicon manufacture that India will avoid by importing solar panels.

An oft-neglected aspect of solar power and its ‘zero ecological footprint’ is the highly toxic manufacturing process. The chemicals required to clean and purify silicon leave behind a toxic sludge that can be an environmental hazard. Most manufacturing has moved to countries with lax environmental laws such as China to lower production costs. As a result, large swathes of the Chinese countryside have been polluted with dangerous chemicals such as silicon tetrachloride, gallium arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, cadmium-telluride, sulphur hexaflouride, thiourea, selenium hydride, nitrogen trifluoride, indium phosphide, hydrofluoric acid, and hexafluoroethane. These seep into the groundwater with deleterious effects on crops, fish, animals, and humans. Polysilicon can be recycled but little investment has been made in the process, which consumes a lot of energy and is expensive.

When solar power was in its infancy, no one noticed the problems it caused the grid because they were small and did not matter much. However, with countries like Germany ramping up solar power, grid stability has become a much greater problem. Electricity grids must always function on the total power generation being equal to the total power demanded. If this is not true, it could cause problems and even trip the grid. With reliable sources of power such as hydro and nuclear, this is easy to manage. However, with solar power, grid engineers experience wild fluctuations in power generation. The amount of power generated by photo voltaic cells can change dramatically in response to unpredictable environmental factors such as cloud cover or temperature. Fast-moving clouds, for example, can reduce the electrical output of solar panels by up to 50 per cent within a few seconds. Currently, engineers use frequency regulation services to compensate for these fluctuations. These add to the total cost of solar power but more importantly, point to the need for significant grid upgradation if solar power is to be accommodated. Does India really need to incur these unnecessary costs?

Even if India were to accept the pains and costs of a decentralised power market and smarter grids, the economics of solar power can also inhibit optimal growth. There is a serious mismatch between the diurnal variation of electricity generated by renewable sources and the diurnal variation of demand for electricity. Simply put, in such markets, the value of solar power decreases as the volume added to the grid increases. When solar power generation is at its maximum on a sunny afternoon, the demand for it is low and utilities will hesitate to pay generators the same amount as earlier or later in the day. According to studies in California, Texas, and Germany, the value of solar power will fall by half by the time it reaches 15 per cent grid capacity and it will be only a quarter as valuable if its capacity reaches 50 per cent. Given that Modi intends to generate about 40 per cent of India’s electricity from renewables by 2030, this might be an important factor to keep in mind.

To be sure, any step away from fossil fuels is good. However, solar power is not the optimal use of India’s resources upon which there are many other demands already. Currently, without large government subsidies, solar power is little more than a fashion statement – rich people who can afford solar panels and storage and do not care about a timely return on their investment may be interested in solar power for its symbolic value. In this manner, solar power can still play a role in the national energy mix, albeit a small one – rooftop, off-grid solar installations can reduce the demand on the national electric grid. Yet to take a personal solution and to inflate it to an international agenda might be to overlook a few hiccups.

India Falters on Nuclear Growth

30 Mon Nov 2015

Posted by in India, Nuclear, South Asia

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As the United Nations Conference on Climate Change gets underway in Le Bourget, a commune in the northeastern suburbs of Paris, thousands of state officials, academics, activists, journalists, and ordinary people await the outcome of the extraordinarily ambitious agenda of the summit. Delegates from 195 countries are expected to gather in Paris and cobble together a legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. Over 145 heads of state have also arrived in Paris at the beginning of the summit, a significant departure from United Nations custom, and many have spoken on the first day.

The protagonist (or antagonist) of the conference is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As the leader of a rapidly growing economy with over 1.25 billion people, Modi’s decision on the burden India will assume in fighting climate change bears substantial consequences on his country as well as the planet. On the opening day, the prime minister spoke at the plenary session, the Innovation Summit, and the launch of the Solar Alliance. It was disconcerting to note that at no event did Modi mention nuclear power, especially since his party had included that, particularly thorium technology, in its election manifesto for the 2014 general elections.

By now, it has become apparent that the Bharatiya Janata Party, while in Opposition, slammed the door on India’s nuclear renaissance. In concert with the Communist Party of India, they pushed for a liability law that was at odds with international norms and has chased international nuclear vendors out of the Indian market. The only firm that still maintains a presence in India is the Russian Rosatom, which has renegotiated its contract and sharply increased the cost of its reactors – the cost of the first two reactors at Kudankulam was approximately Rs 17,300 crores while the third and fourth are expected to cost about Rs 39,400 crore. Meanwhile, the government has shown little interest in the Indian nuclear establishment ramping up nuclear power either. The sector has not undergone the necessary reforms to make it a competitive industry nor have there been announcements of a series of new projects. During the first 18 months in office, all that Modi Sarkar has achieved in the nuclear arena is the purchase of uranium ore from overseas – something that the previous government would have been able to do anyway since the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008.

It is unrealistic to expect the BJP to be pro patria before pro politica and walk back its errors on civil nuclear liability. Thankfully, there is another option that allows India to circumvent the nuclear liability logjam altogether – thorium. Considered the next generation of the nuclear era, thorium-fuelled reactors are proliferation resistant, safer, cheaper, and more efficient than most reactors in service presently. Thorium is plentiful in India, and more crucially, all thorium technology, from mining to reprocessing, has been indigenously developed. In every aspect, India can be completely self-sufficient with the deployment of thorium reactors.

Although the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) is presently the mainstay of Indian thorium reactor technology, thorium reactor design is not constrained to this one model. Indian scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) are also studying the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) for future deployment. These reactors contain passive safety features in their design that make them, according to one director at the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL), suitable for construction without an exclusion zone or even in the middle of a city. The MSR, for example, is a low pressure reactor that does not have fuel elements in zircaloy cladding. This reduces chances of any mishap due to excess pressure from steam or buildup of hydrogen. Furthermore, like most newer designs even in conventional reactors, thorium reactors come with a core catcher that prevents any radiation leak even in case of total core rupture.

Thorium reactors are also cheaper than conventional reactors. One reason is that unlike uranium, it does not require expensive isotope separation during fuel fabrication. Furthermore, the higher burnup of fuel envisaged in such reactors makes them far more efficient. Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia approximates that a tonne of thorium could produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium or four million tonnes of coal. Consequently, far less nuclear waste is generated. More importantly, no isotopes with a half-life of beyond 35 years are present in the waste from thorium reactors which reduces storage time by over an order of magnitude.

What makes thorium politically expedient for the BJP is the favourable actuarial numbers on thorium reactors. Substantially lower than on conventional reactors, liability, and hence insurance pools, can afford to be much smaller and affordable. This would not necessitate that the party back down on its earlier stipulations for a nuclear liability law, though it would still be inefficient but less so.

Powering India’s growth by thorium opens the door to several new economic opportunities: an abundance of cheap electricity may well encourage a shift from gas, petrol, and diesel for cooking and transportation. This will not happen overnight but even a small shift can reduce India’s hydrocarbon import bill. Nuclear energy can also release Railways capacity from the burden of transporting millions of tonnes of coal, reducing the need to expand services. It has almost become an article of faith that India cannot grow without coal. This might be true in the short term but there is no need to accept this in the medium term. A substantial shift from coal over the next 30 years is possible if the government creates and follows a concerted and aggressive plan to expand nuclear and hydro power.

The key obstacle to mass deployment of thorium is the lack of fissile material. Under the auspices of the Conference on Climate Change, Modi could have lobbied the international community to allow India to acquire plutonium and spent nuclear fuel, under safeguards, of course, from the global market for use in its fast breeder and thorium reactors. Modi ought to have also used the opportunity to pitch for developed states to provide soft loans for the expansion of nuclear and thorium power. Unfortunately, the moment was squandered chasing after solar unicorns.

At the summit, Modi has announced an ambitious programme of solar power growth. This is not reliable enough to fulfill India’s growing demand. All solutions to the demerits of solar power are posited in the future – China will export sufficient rare earths, we will be able to manufacture enough panels, efficiency will increase, we will solve storage within a decade. That much hope can certainly keep the casinos of Las Vegas in business but will not provide a solution to India’s energy shortage. Nuclear power and thorium technology is a proven solution that is ready to be deployed now. It is a shame that Modi Sarkar has not realised that yet.