Mumbai, India -- India and China, with their rapid growth and extraordinary need for new energy, have been seen as the global drivers of future carbon pollution, particularly from coal-fired electricity. China today burns almost half of the world's coal, and India was projected to add almost two hundred new coal-fired power plants over the next five years.
Per capita emissions in both countries are far below U.S. levels, though, and India's are only a fraction of the global average. Both also have made considerably more-ambitious policy commitments to clean energy than has the United States. China spent $1.13 cents of every $10,000 of average income on clean energy between 2002 and 2008, India spent $0.43, and the U.S. spent only $0.19.
But regardless of how much more they were doing than the U.S, neither China nor India had found a pathway to commit to a solidly clean energy future (although China's recent announcement of a solar feed-in tariff is very exciting and could double that country's solar capacity by the end of the year).
What's changed is the outlook for coal. As my colleague Justin Guay has been pointing out in his blog, the financial assumptions and underpinnings of a coal-fired, rapid-growth future for Asia have fallen apart as it's become clear that, while some coal is cheap and (geologically speaking) coal is abundant, cheap coal is not abundant.
In India, skyrocketing prices for imported coal have devastated plans to grow the power sector, and one company that's been forced to adapt is Tata Power, which is part of the broader Tata Group. Tata Power was constructing one of the world's largest coal-fired power plants, Tata Mundra. When Tata announced that price increases for Indonesian coal meant that it would need to double electricity prices (and would still lose money for the next five years on Tata Mundra), its stock slumped.
But Tata moved quickly -- clearly it had seen the crisis brewing.
The Tata Group has no counterpart in this country. It combines under one broad management India's largest private power company, Tata Power; the country's major producer of solar cells (in partnership with BP); a mobile phone company; and an automotive manufacturer (which makes both the world's cheapest car, the Tata Nano, and Jaguars and Land Rovers). Other business include steel and iron (along with the associated coal mining), hotels, and insurance. Most of its stock is owned by a series of charitable trusts. So Tata, in effect, is the Indian equivalent of American Electric Power, Ford, US Steel, Dow, First Solar, Marriott, and Sprint, with most of the profits going to equivalents of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
So it was major news this week when the Tata Group announced that it was simultaneously going to increase its total electricity generation eightfold in the next six years, while providing 25 percent of that power from clean energy sources -- a stunning single firm commitment of 6 gigawatts of clean energy in six years! "The price of fossil fuel, be it coal, gas or oil, is heading northwards, which seems to be the trend in the foreseeable future. There are no signs to indicate that this will come down. This gives a huge opportunity for other renewable forms to pick up and gain ground," said Banmali Agrawala, who heads Tata's renewable-energy efforts.
To give a sense of scale, India's total current electrical capacity is 165 gigawatts, and the Indian government's 2020 goal for total solar power is 20 gigawatts. California Governor Jerry Brown's goal for distributed solar is 12 gigawatts by 2020, in an economy that has 60 gigawatts of capacity. By any standard, then, Tata's single firm commitment is very ambitious.
Now we need to find half a dozen other corporate champions to join Tata. Any nominations?
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"China spent $1.13 cents of every $10,000 of average income on clean energy between 2002 and 2008""
May I point out that China make a commitment to use it's dirty coal energy to dominate energy intensive businesses like melting sand with electric arch furnaces to make solar cells and making steel for giant wind turbines. Last I heard China exports 95+% of all the solar cells they make! Most likely they export 80-90% of their wind turbines.
I agree with your assessment that China and India are looking beyond coal because at the rate China is burning coal even with the 4th largest proven reserves it will be out of coal around 2035 if present trends continue. In any case coal usage is growing so fast in the developing world that coal will surpass oil as the fossil fuel of choice before 2016!
One thing you did not mention was nuclear. I bet by 2035 the fast developing nations will get more power from nuclear than the industrial nations and even more than from their renewables!
What we need is a REAL energy revolution. We need "the internet" not "a dead end highway owned by Chevron, which is what Big Energy is, including Big Solar and Big Wind. So, decentralization, democratization, clean NONDEADLY power production within the built environment. We need PACE loans and generous (not cheapskate) Feed in Tariffs, and we, the people will do the rest.
So, when are you going to start supporting legitimate, clean, affordable energy solutions and stop pushing for power that costs double what rooftop solar does (yep, Bright Source concentrating solar at Ivanpah, has an installed cost per mW of installed capacity and capacity factor that is TWICE what rooftop solar would have cost, not even counting the profit margins and the lost ecosystem services, and is paid for almost entirely by taxpayers, and built on public wilderness).
Edit: fixed paraphrase of average megawatts. I originally left out some words and wound up with garbled nonsense.
If you are talking about power produced during peak load (midday, midsummer), rooftop is slightly higher because solar works better at LOWER temperatures, and efficiency drops ~12% for air-cooled CSP when it's over 100 degrees (all summer at Ivanpah).
Ivanpah also has no storage. If it did, it would cost another ~50% higher to squeeze a few more hours out of heated thermal liquid (salt or other liquid), and although it burns gas in extremely inefficient turbines (how green!) to boost power production in the morning and during system (not transmission) failures, it does not modulate output to be more consistent to the grid. What it makes is what you get.
In fact, concentrating the panels in one place heightens the likelihood of power dips in storms when compared to disbursed panels, and putting 100+ miles of transmission between power and the people makes it more vulnerable to weather, fire, earthquake and cyber/traditional terrorist attack. Which is why the military is pulling off our centralized grid.
Non-tracking PV produces less total energy relative to its peak power capacity than heliostat systems. For comparison, Copper Mountain was planned to have 48 MW capacity and produce 100 GWh/y, according to this article http://www.pge.com/about/news/mediarelations/newsreleases/q3_2009/090727.shtml, equivalent to 2083 hours per year of capacity. Ivanpah has 392 MW and is to produce 1080 GWh/y, equivalent to 2755 hours per year of capacity. That's 30% better if you look at total output than if you look at capacity: not enough to make up for a factor of two in cost, but enough to match a significant part of the difference. I would also expect rooftop solar to do somewhat worse in total output relative to capacity than a PV farm in the desert: most buildings have more cloudy days, and many are in shade part of the day.