Small is still Beautiful

Power sector should look for bottom-up approaches to generation
The last six months
saw a historic
event in the Indian hydel power sector. A little known state company called Sutlej Vidyut Nigam Limited which is a Himachal state-owned company with a central government stake, launched the largest hydel power station, in all time, in the world. It was a 250 MW x 6 nos set of units, the last of which was installed a couple of months ago, a little ahead of the monsoons in the remote Rampur district of Himachal on the road to Wangchoo, an army outpost, and beyond. The power is harnessed from the fast-flowing, frothing Sutlej in this sub-Himalayan region. There was not much fanfare. But it was a significant addition, considering that it was adding as much as 1.5 per cent to the total generating capacity, and a chunky 10 per cent to the hydel generating capacity alone in the country.
In the first flush of formation of government, Mr P Chidambaram, the finance minister, announced, early June, that his government is committed to adding 10,000 MW to the existing generating power capacity in the country.
Let’s step back and look at how the power scenario has evolved. The entire power generating capacity in the country created in all of the last hundred years is a little under 110,000 MW. That, in effect, means the use of an equivalent of 80,000 MW of power in industry [30 per cent], agriculture [30 per cent], and at homes and the service sector [40 per cent]. This is because the massive transmission and distribution [T & D] losses account for the differential between 110,000 MW and 80,000 MW. Power planners have been defeated by this bugbear of losses, over the last five decades. The best of power engineers at the apex level shrug their shoulders, and express helplessness.
Add to this the woes of power corporations across the country, in state after state, who are reeling under losses thanks to the political compulsions of free power being doled out to farmers.
You saw what the new Congress government in AP did almost the very day they assumed power—announce scrapping of power tariffs for the rural grid. The new regime at the Centre with Manmohan Singh, despite all his unique demonstrated abilities at steering the economy, will find itself soon faltering when he has to contend with these massive losses that arise out of giving power free to farmers across India.
So where is the money for creating such power infrastructure going to come from? And who will foot the bill on the cost of the fund, or the maintenance of the entire machinery of distribution year after year, if nearly 30 per cent of the power consumed by the rural grid, is not going to be tariff-ed?
Consider another fact: If the total available, consummable power is in the region of 80,000 MW, as much as an additional staggering 30,000 MW is generated locally by the little and big gensets that the shopkeeper uses on the market street, or the sugar mill produces on a bagasse or other by-products base, because such industries are required to do so by legislation.
Such self-generation, therefore, accounts for more than one-third the total generating capacity that India has created in nearly six decades of independence! And this, after a cumulative investment of Rs 6.60 lakh crores. Now, if that seems too boggling a statistic, think of it this way: last year’s total ‘turnover’ of India [or its GDP] was Rs 12.5 lakh crore. That means about one-half an entire year’s GDP has been so far cumulatively spent in the power sector.
Collapse of Confidence
The fact that over 30 per cent of the total power generation in the country is represented by self-generating power systems is sad testimony to the complete collapse of confidence of the people in the ability of the government to take care of their need for electrical energy. But it also represents a silver lining in this dark cloud. It shows India’s immense potential to generate its power need at the localized level, instead of at the inefficient, centralized level. Besides, the country does not have that kind of money to throw into such large investment in power infrastructure [See box on Big is Bad . . ]
The solution does not altogether lie in these centralized, humungous power projects that are not sustainable at all. India continues to be a biomass-rich country. The country is also rated as the best [China is as good as we are] in technologies for local generation based on biomass gasifiers and mini-micro hydel systems.
If you carved the entire sub-Himalayan region and the Western ghats, you will find about 10 per cent of our power generation could be taken care of with hydel stations dotting every rapid–flowing river in the hills. But not the large hydel stations, but a series of little water-powered energy systems that can micro-manage power needs of small human settlements.
These hydels can be as small as 5 KW to a size of 1 MW [or 1,000 KW]. The advantage of building such smaller stations is that local communities, at the village, tehsil or block level could meet its requirement with such generation; take responsibility for their running; and the stations could be created as community assets, with the authority to plan and create them devolving at the Zilla Parishad level itself.
This will mean taking the prerogative away from the hands of the large power planners at the Centre and State government level, and getting people at the localized level to be excited, committed and involved in their creation and operation. There is the added advantage of saving of cost on cabling infrastructure which is a substantial chunk of investment in the power sector.
Any electrical engineer worth his salt, entrenched in the government, will sneer at the prospect of grassroots power generation, and pooh-pooh its feasibility. We have reached a point where, clearly, the citizen has shown the way. The little gensets that the shopkeeper uses runs on diesel. There are any number of established techniques and systems that can help reconfigure these engines, as many unsung technologists in the country have proven time and again, to use other renewable energy sources as feedstock. This will encourage roads to sustainability [See box, Tilting the Power Factor, Page 8].
Clearly, India has the left-handed advantage of having skipped the massive high-consumption phase that post-War US and Europe saw. That has left our natural resources in reasonable health.
Both Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram have proven their mettle in the face of stiff odds in the terms that they served at the centre in the nineties. Will they bring some sort of a sanity check on the armageddon of centralized growth that the power planners in Delhi will thrust upon them.
If only they did not lose touch with reality in the rural heartland of the country, there could yet be hope for people in the India that is Bharat, and redemption for a government that is keen on serving successfully the mandate they have got from the people.