A few months ago I went to this Ethiopean restaurant which had a very interesting poster. It was one of an arid street in Ethiopia and a kid having a coke with the text below saying – “Ethiopia – 13 months of summer“. This very thought came to my mind when the monsoons started in August for most parts of the country this year. The world is changing and not nearly as planned. We are fighting over greenhouse emissions as if its our “birthright” to pollute and the Americans are keeping us from realizing it. And of course its raining lesser.

Some of these thoughts came up in our discussion (Ashish and I) and I am back here to write mostly about “green” and sometimes about technology. One motive of these posts is also to learn from you through comments / discussions what we can do in India in terms of innovation in sustainable technologies which can help improve lives in general.

Technology to make lives better – Solar

Everyone knows that solar energy is the biggest source of sustainable energy and the energy for the future. For starters, most of the cost in solar energy is the fixed cost with almost negligible variable (running) costs. As logic would indicate, mass adoption of solar energy will always remain a dream till generation of solar energy costs lesser than fossil fuels. Apart from this however what are the factors that stop us from adopting solar energy as a mass mode of energy creation?

  • Solar energy is not available directly at night, therefore systems based purely on solar energy have to have storage for intermediate forms of energy created (like electricity).
  • In terms of conversion of solar energy into alternate usable energy types, the two most common forms are – heat and electricity. Both these conversions are highly inefficient – (12-18% conversions possible) although there is scope for research here and some educational institutes are doing it already. There is also a loss in converting from DC to AC.
  • Fixed costs in setting up solar energy stations (Photovoltaic) is costly – however some companies like Solyndra and research at PARC have made some intelligent changes thereby using lesser photovoltaic cells but covering a larger area.
  • Large areas needed for mass scale production – Unlike other forms, solar energy does require large areas to tap sunlight. As most of know, land costs are non trivial in India and (along with transmission) I see this as a major deterrent.

So where do you think we can innovate and better utilise this resource? What are the unique opportunities and challenges that India poses which will help us tackle this problem better?

Some of the questions that often crop up in such discussions are -

  • What are the next gen focus areas for harnessing solar energy?
  • How can we make intelligent use of sustainable sources of energy and overcome challenges (like 12 hours of sunshine etc)
  • Avoiding transmission losses and thereby reducing wastage
  • Whats the pay-back period that we can look at?
  • Is there an advantage in economies of scale? How do we have economies of scale while prices and adoption is low?

Lets us know your questions / thoughts / ideas.

In most of my blog posts, I would be writing about such topics which hold relevance for us in terms of technology and science – but also typically important to us in terms of India and the environment as such. As always, all kinds of feedback and discussions will be appreciated. We surely don’t want the rain to go to Spain – do we?