When fossil fuel capitalists enter renewables – Issue #90
"When the same business groups manufacture your solar panels and generate and transport your coal power the conflicts of interest are particularly egregious"
News of the week
First, renewable energy.
Reliance New Energy is looking for Pumped Storage sites, reported Mint. With that, the conglomerate will add another vertical to its already ambitious RE plans. The firm’s gigafactories for photovoltaic panels, fuel cell systems, green hydrogen, energy storage, and power electronics are expected to go live in the second half of this fiscal year. It is now adding pumped storage to that list.
It was an unsurprising decision. Partly because, as Mint wrote: “According to CareEdge, the levelised cost from pumped storage projects is around Rs 4.7 per unit compared to that from battery energy storage system at around Rs 6.6 per unit.” And partly because, as news reports tell us each day, India’s RE sector is becoming a game of large corporations. Take pumped storage. Reliance is entering a field with other biggies like NHPC, Tata Power, Adani Green Energy, and JSW. The only pure play RE firm here is Greenko.
Three of these firms — Data, Adani and JSW — operate in both fossil fuels and renewables. This, wrote Bloomberg columnist David Fickling on Twitter, might delay India’s green switch.
Events last week supported his claim further. Even as Adani Green entered the US successfully with a new dollar bond, its parent company told the government, along with Essar and JSW, that it wants to set up new coal-based power plants in India. Between them, these three conglomerates want to set up at least 10 GW of coal power capacity over the next 10 years.
It makes for a strange moment. To go back to RE, Mint had an interesting report last week about the under-explored area of agrivoltaics. Here, solar panels are erected over farmers’ fields and, in the most common model, revenues from the sale of power are split between the project proponent and the farmer. It’s a promising solution. Not only would it shield plants from ever-worsening heat waves and help India amp up faster on solar capacity, it would also create an ancillary revenue stream for farmers. “Farmer Harpal Dagar had leased 4.5 acres out of the 9 acres he owned to (a) solar developer for 27 years,” writes Mint. “(Growing one crop a year), Dagar’s annual earnings from the farm ranged from ₹25,000-₹35,000 an acre… The lease gets him ₹1 lakh per acre a year.”
While working on India’s nuclear push, CarbonCopy had heard that India doesn’t have enough land to create a 100% renewable grid. One reads such reports and wonders if that is indeed the case.
And yet, instead of bankrolling such solutions, India is in the throes of boosting gas capacity — and doling out subsidies.
There is a complexity to this moment. It’s easy to understand why a coal-baron would resist decarbonisation. What happens, however, when the coal-baron also has investments in renewables? Do relative economics of the two forms of energy play out unhindered? Or is the smaller one (renewables) used to cross-subsidise the other (coal)?
As things stand, this surge of interest in coal extends beyond these three firms. The ministry of coal has invited feedback for its coal gasification plans. Coal India has just notched its highest production ever.
Hardwired into all this is a larger question.
The last three weeks have seen a spate of announcements from the energy sector. These, however, have been counterbalanced by ever more concerning developments on the climate front. Belated snowfall in the Himalayas. Forest fires in the US. Heat waves in Australia. The slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). And now, the worsening water situation in Karnataka.
In the state, part of north Karnataka — and Bangalore — are threatening to run short of water even before summer really begins. News reports from Bangalore talk about residential colonies struggling for water already, even before summer begins. The first forest fires in the state are being reported as well. Across the country, dam reservoirs are low on water as well. A hard summer lies ahead.
On the whole, India is making stuttering progress on RE and badly lagging on adaptation and mitigation.
Is it because it’s easier for the country’s political economy to profit off capex than through the myriad, painstaking activities that comprise adaptation and mitigation — like desilting lakes, fighting land encroachment, curbing deforestation, mass transit systems, what have you?
Take Haryana. News came last week that it wants to build a green wall in the Aravallis. The same state government, however, also wants to decimate Mangar Bani. And then, there is the growing immiseration of the poor. How does a country fight climate change while reducing the capacity of its people to withstand climate shocks and stresses?
Climate Long Reads
1. How Chinese automakers are churning out EVs faster than others (WSJ). This article can also be read at the Mint website.
2. China intensifies push to ‘delete’ America from its technology (WSJ). This article can also be read at the Mint website.
3. IEEFA has a new report out on India’s green hydrogen plans.
4. Don’t let hybrids muddle our path to net-zero: EVs must prevail (Mint)
5. Ambani Shining. India Not So Much (Bloomberg)
6. Qatar’s Gas Push Has a Hidden Motive — Murdering Coal (Bloomberg)
7. The Obscene Energy Demands of AI (New Yorker)
Non-Climate Long Read
Superconductivity scandal: the inside story of deception in a rising star's physics lab (Nature)
Book of the week
We just finished reading an absolutely harrowing book.
Unfair Game by Michael Ashcroft is a look into South Africa’s vile captive lion farms. These farms, which have more African lions than the protected areas of South Africa, bring the industrial economy into every stage of these cats’ lives. Cubs are monetised by letting tourists pet them. Once they get older, they are released into (small) enclosures where amateur hunters hunt them. Thereafter, the bones, the pelt, the teeth, everything is sold to customers in the far-east.
There is legit conservation. And then, there is the lot which creates private wildlife collections — from suppliers who keep topping up their gene pools through wild captures. And, worse than even them, are these abattoirs which masquerade as captive wildlife breeding farms. A while ago, we had alluded to A Certain Curve Of Horn, which looked at this industry. So does Unfair Game. Check out its review here.