“COVID-19 is awful. Climate change would be worse”
– Bill Gates
If this does not scare you, I don’t know what will.
The International Solar Alliance (ISA) is an alliance of 121 countries initiated by India. Most of them are the sunshine countries. With its vision “Let us together make the sun brighter” and mission “every home no matter how far away, will have a light at home”, ISA is committed to a better sustainable and a green future.
Also, five public sector undertaking (PSU) under Petroleum & Natural Gas Ministry, ONGC, IOCL, BPCL, HPCL and GAIL Limited will be joining ISAs Coalition for Sustainable Climate Action as Corporate Partners.
Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Dharmendra Pradhan said that even Indian Oil & Gas companies are actively making efforts to deploy solar panels across the value chain of their operations. Last year over 5000 fuel stations were solarized and around 50% of the total fuel stations owned by Public Sector oil companies will be solarized within next five years.
Under the ‘Atma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan’ or the ‘Make in India ’announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, our country has also received proposals from various players for over 10 GW of fresh solar equipment manufacturing. Apart from this, a leading Indian solar module manufacturer also received a major order worth $105Million from a US-based company.
India has the lowest per capita carbon emissions in the world. We have scaled up our non-fossil fuel based power generation to 134 GW which is about 35% of the total Indian power generation capacity and aims to make it 220 GW by 2022. Globally, India ranks fourth in terms of renewable power.
In brief, renewable energy sector, mainly solar power sector has realized its potential to contribute in the reinvigoration of the Indian economy.
Although, solar energy is prevalent in most of the countries, it may not be efficient and enough alone. Hence, it must collaborate with the other renewable energy sources which are prominent in those regions.
There are several coal and gas deficit poor countries which become more poor by purchasing it from other countries. These are the regions which can revamp its economy by becoming self-reliant and generating its own renewable power. Battery storage will also play a broader role.
Unfortunately, coal is not going away anytime soon. However, wherever possible we can replace it with the fly ash, Ground Granulated Blast-furnace Slag and silica fume which are the byproducts of iron and steel industry, silicon industries. This way we can divert waste from landfill and save on the need for fossil fuels.
Since it’s always better to clean it up rather than washing it away.
Also, there has been hype of clean mobility. To obviate the limitation of long distances in the electric vehicles, we can use electrochemical hydrogen produced from excess solar and wind energy along with the battery. Pumped hydrogen could be another disruptive alternative for GWh storage.
The ongoing supply and demand disruption due to the COVID-19 could cause the deployment of new renewable energy capacity added this year to decline. In spite of that, solar sector will prove out to be the only source of energy with an upward trajectory.
Now is the time to rethink the role of fuel, its alternatives and set better pricing strategies.
Thanks for reading.