Transform Villages with Bio Energy A carefully-crafted mission can bring cooking fuel and electricity to the deprived households in the hinterland AJAY SHANKAR India can, rightfully, derive satisfaction from the success in getting the Jawaharlal Solar Energy Mission smoothly off the ground, and that too in a short period of time with competitive large-scale private participation. The timing of the mission has been just right as there is growing optimism across the world that we could be on the verge of significant cost reductions in solar energy. Given the scale of our programme, 1,000 mw in the first phase, the country could emerge as a globally-competitive player in this field. There is, similarly, a compelling case for a creative approach towards the design and execution of a National Bio Energy Mission. India has the largest cattle population in the world. Cow dung generates methane that is worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas contributing to global warming and climate change. Cow dung is normally converted by rural households into cow-dung cakes that are used for cooking. The burning of cow-dung cakes and fuel wood for cooking adversely affects the lungs and eyes of women. Further, this generates black carbon that, according to many, may accelerate the melting of Himalayan glaciers. In a business as usual scenario, it will take decades for the country to urbanise and for poverty to be overcome to the extent that households start using clean cooking stoves. Even then, cow dung will still keep generating methane. The technology for converting cow dung to useful commercial energy has been around for quite some time and has been in use in large dairy farms across the world. The useful energy goes up over three times with available technology. Further, the minimum size of such units has gone down, and so, village-level plants are now technically feasible. Normally, the methane from cow dung is used for generating electricity. Similarly, small plants can use crop residues and fuel wood for electricity generation through gasification. Quite a few of them have been installed in the country and their operating experience has generated confidence in the robustness of the technology. In the 1980s, the department of non-conventional energy had spent huge sums of money for the setting up gobar gas plants across rural India. The idea was to supply piped gobar gas for cooking. As is often the case with good ideas in government, the programme was scaled up too rapidly. With the wisdom of hindsight, one can say that field trials, testing, getting feedback and then redesigning in an iterative manner to finally generate a robust programme should have preceded largescale implementation. In the absence of this approach, it is difficult to now even find the remains of these gobar gas plants in the villages where these were installed with great fanfare. Maybe the plants did not provide enough gas at the right pressure for cooking when households wanted to cook. Maybe the high cost of the cooking stoves came in the way of large-scale usage. Maybe the plants were prone to frequent breakdowns and the repair and maintenance capability with ready supply of spares was not created. Maybe there were no funds for repairs and since the plants came as a gift from the government and had yet to establish their value to the users, they were not willing to spend money on repairs. Usually, government programmes have the twin problems of a straightjacket of a standard rate of subsidy or grant and a government machinery for implementation that very soon becomes a prisoner of financial and physical targets of plants installed and villages covered. One can see the problem with the Rajiv Gandhi village electrification programme (RGGVY) where it is reported that thousands of villages have been electrified with expenditure of thousands of crores of rupees, but there seems to be no real idea of how many more rural households are actually using electricity for lighting as a result of the programme. A suitably-designed National Bio Energy Mission should have the flexibility to experiment with different approaches to evolve a programme suitable for scaling up. The key challenge would be to design a viable and sustainable transaction whereby rural households supply cow dung for the running of a village-level plant for generating electricity. The supply can be at a price, or in exchange for supply of electricity for lighting, or for liquified petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking. This transaction has, however, to be attractive enough to ensure sustained supply. This would also be the case where a village-level plant is run on fuel wood and/or crop residues. The operation and maintenance of the plant would, in turn, need to be financially viable. This would, therefore, require that the price at which this plant supplies electricity is such that the cost of fuel, operation, maintenance and depreciation is recovered along with a reasonable margin to make it attractive enough for new entrants. The electricity in electrified villages would need to be fed to the grid on a metered basis. In unelectrified villages, as well as in villages that do not get evening supply as a norm, these plants would need to have local battery storage so that evening electricity demand can be met. The capital and revenue subsidy needed for such plants would emerge initially on a case-by-case basis. The mission would need to experiment with many pilots in partnerships with private enterprise, NGOs and village panchayats across different states. It should be willing to accept differences in subsidies for different pilot projects as well as many failures in the learning phase. However, for a unit of electricity, the subsidy would, in any case, be considerably less than the implicit subsidy for every unit of electricity under the solar mission. After learning for, say, two years after commissioning of a few hundred plants, a robust design with costs for rapid scaling up could emerge. The subsidies involved may well be affordable. Rural India could then be transformed in less than a decade. (The author is a former civil servant)
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 05:40:54 +0000
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