Power distribution news, communicating climate and more - Issue #18
News of the Week
Power distribution was a staple of news headlines last week.
About a month ago, with the Draft Electricity (Amendment) Bill, India’s power ministry mooted a large overhaul of power distribution in the country. One of its objectives is to open up power distribution. As this newsletter described two weeks ago, the proposal had run into opposition.
Last week came further information. The ministry uploaded the Draft Electricity (Amendment) Rules, 2022 and invited comments till 11 September 2022. It has a couple of intriguing clauses. The ministry has proposed “a central pool of renewable energy sources from which an intermediary company will procure power to be supplied to an entity that will undertake distribution and retail supply to more than one State”.
This arrangement is puzzling. This firm, as Mercom wrote as well, will buy power from generators and sell to distributors – interestingly, at a uniform tariff predetermined by a central agency.
This is hard to fathom. If the new entrants into power distribution ride on discoms’ existing infrastructure and buy power off a central procurer -- as opposed to scouting for their own PPAs -- what value do they add? Why does the ministry want an intermediary company? Will uniform tariffs add – or reduce – efficiency?
That was just the start of an eventful week. Three days later, on Thursday, the Centre barred 13 states from buying or selling electricity on power exchanges until they clear their current bills from power plants. This included heavyweights like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Pending dues from discoms are one big reason India’s power producers are in the doldrums. "This will be a regular feature now. It may cause some inconvenience but will bring the required discipline," an official told Economic Times.
And yet, things are not that simple. There are real reasons why discoms are cash-strapped. What we have now is a punitive measure that, instead of tackling root causes, forces states to pay up or face power cuts. One likely fallout? They will have to divert funds from other heads of expenditure – or borrow.
There is yet more news from the power ministry. Last week, it recommended a slower rollout of Flue Gas Desulphurization, which seeks to scrub Sulphur Dioxide emissions from thermal power plants – the current deadline is December 2022 for plants in cities with over a million people.
One reason is a difference of opinion over the scale of the problem. While the Environment Ministry wants FGDs, a study by CEA (Central Electricity Authority) found that “areas around 4,430-MW of coal-fired capacity had severe annual average SO2 levels. Areas around 21 units with 5200-MW capacity had high SO2 levels” – and low levels elsewhere. Between this -- and the high cost of FGDs are expensive -- the ministry wants a slower rollout.
All this makes for a profoundly odd moment. Not only is the environment ministry taking a rare hardline stance on an environmental question, but the power ministry has (also) portrayed its reluctance about FGDs in green terms. “FGD equipment produces equivalent amount of CO2 for neutralisation of SO2,”
an unidentified official told ET’s Sarita Singh. “FGD also increases auxiliary power consumption leading to more coal consumption. Also, FGD results in reduction sulphate aerosols (SO4) in the upper atmosphere that has a cooling impact. The atmospheric temperature will be increased due to CO2 generation and SO4 reduction.”
A double dose of cognitive dissonance!
On other fronts, the world cycled along as ever. Poorer nations struggled to import energy. The world saw unrest in Argentina; a rising number of google searches for firewood in Germany; power shortages continue in China; and given the heatwave, rivers are drying up in Europe and China.
The second of these images is jaw-dropping. The mighty Yangtze, large enough to house the Three Gorges Dam, has shrunk. In our world, several rivers do run dry by the time they reach the sea – too much extraction of water along the way – but Wuhan is nowhere near the sea. And yet, the riverbed lies drying in the sun.
Back home in India, too, much of the news stayed predictable. Given the energy shock, a third of all captive power units in India has closed. Ola said its electric car would be brilliant (“fastest and sportiest,” it told us). Adani’s growth continued. Last week, the company acquired the thermal power projects of DB Group for a little over Rs 7,000 crore; acquired inland container depot operator Tumb; and announced an entry into aluminium production. Citing threats, the government gave founder and chairman Gautam Adani Z Class security.
Meltdown of the Week
That distinction goes to India’s Power Ministry.
Last week, India's Power Ministry showed little regard for protocol as it decided to use its Twitter account to go after Business Standard’s Shreya Jai.
Climate Podcast of the Week
The good folks at The India Energy Hour, Shreya Jai and Sandeep Pai, interviewed Climate Trends’ Aarti Khosla. See the ensuing discussion on communicating climate change here.
Mind-blowing Moment of the Week
Courtesy NASA, we now know what a black hole sounds like.
Climate Long Reads
In 2018, Kachin State in Myanmar saw the army force locals out. The news, emerging simultaneously as the military’s attack on the Rohingyas, did not get the attention it deserved. Initial speculation wondered about local amber and jade mines being a possible cause. Now, from Global Witness, comes a report saying China is now getting a huge chunk of its rare earths from Kachin State.
What Myanmar is seeing is the resource curse. Locals get driven away. Local elite (like the military and civilian leaders) collude with larger economies to ravage their own country’s chances of development. And so, this single-sided report about resource nationalism in Latin America is worth reading. An illustrative quote: “Latin America specializes in killing golden geese, and one of the quickest ways to do so is through resource nationalism,” said Benjamin Gedan, a Latin America expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center who closely tracks the region’s lithium industry.
“It’s very important to contextualize optimism, or else you’d get into what’s cruel optimism, which is, “Everything’s going to be OK, so stop worrying. That’s cruel optimism because it’s not going to be OK without immense effort. Optimism of the will means you beat people with the reminder that we could still get to a good outcome, and we’re not doing it. But we could. And since we could, we should. This is the basic optimism-of-the-will argument. The scientists are telling us that if we decarbonize fast and if we even invent some carbon drawdown methods and put them to use and pay for them, we could dodge the mass extinction event. The window for that is closing.” Politico interviews Kim Stanley Robinson on climate change, his choice to site a part of the book in India, the BJP, and more.
Book of the Week
This week's candidate is Elizabeth Kolbert’s
Under A White Sky: The Nature Of The Future
.
The usual reaction to a loss of control is to double down harder. This is what is happening with humans and the earth as well. As the planet slips into less predictable terrains – imperilling species, human habitations, the works – mankind is doubling down on its efforts to stop the planet from changing. Geoengineering is one instance. More intensive management of ecosystems and endangered species is another. As Kolbert writes: “If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control.”
Can this work? Or will we all fall, as usual, to hubris and the accompanying law of unforeseen consequences?
Read a review here.