India Eyeing a New Monster 100GW Solar-Capacity Goal (arstechnica.com) 155
AmiMoJo writes: In a confirmed report India's energy minister suggested that the country is considering issuing a tender for 100 gigawatts of solar energy, which may be tied to solar panel-manufacturing buildout. In 2015, India set a goal to reach 100GW of solar capacity as part of its larger aim of 175GW of renewable energy in general by 2022. This latest 100GW tender would be for a 2030 or 2035 target.
The existing goal is ambitious, so a stretch goal further into the future is even more so. The country's current total solar capacity is just 24.4GW, (for context, as of this month the US has about 55.9GW of installed solar capacity total) but it's growing quickly. Utility-scale solar capacity grew by 72 percent in the previous year.
The existing goal is ambitious, so a stretch goal further into the future is even more so. The country's current total solar capacity is just 24.4GW, (for context, as of this month the US has about 55.9GW of installed solar capacity total) but it's growing quickly. Utility-scale solar capacity grew by 72 percent in the previous year.
Good for you India (Score:3)
Thanks for showing us what can be done.
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News: A very ambitious project is being considered by India for a pre-plan assessment of feasibility which might lead to the beginning of a plan within the next 5 years.
Slashdot: What a wonderful success! Thank you India for being a leader and "showing us what can be done."
Are we really so detached from reality that praise is given in the present for accomplishing a possible and unlikely future event? Remember when India claimed they were making a tablet for $20 or when they said they would be on the moon b
Re:Good for you India (Score:4, Insightful)
Are we really so detached from reality that praise is given in the present for accomplishing a possible and unlikely future event? Remember when India claimed they were making a tablet for $20 or when they said they would be on the moon by a few years ago without any external help?
Have you looked at the American government recently? Even just having a plan to do something reasonably achievable that's not inherently evil does seem like a vast improvement over the current American government...
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Are we really so detached from reality that praise is given in the present for accomplishing a possible and unlikely future event?
Mexico paying for a wall is what wins elections these days so yes, yes we are.
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Really? They have four times our population, and half our solar capacity.
So, 1/8 as much as we have, on a per capita basis.
Even if they complete this new goal, they'll still have no more solar capacity per capita in 20 years than we have today.
175 GW would be roughly 23% of India's energy use (Score:3, Insightful)
Translating a few numbers from here [wikipedia.org], that means India would be getting about 23% of total energy consumption from solar (it's currently 2.89%). And is attempting to roughly double nuclear power generation within 25 years...
With even India onboard for a rapid ramp-up in low CO2 energy production, the CO2 reduction targets the world desires will be beat quite handily and without any additional effort. It was always the nations like India and China that were the big sources of CO2 so they are the main ones to watch in dealing with this issue.
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From your own link it says "Total primary energy use of 775 Mtoe in 2013"
775 Mtoe = 9013250 Gw
100 * 100 / 9013250 = 0.001%
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Also the article states India curently already has 24.4GW of solar, so again (100GW + 24.4GW) / 24.4GW does not equal 23% / 2.89%....
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(100GW + 24.4GW)
Dude, look at the subject of your own post, a copy of my point - the figure in question is 175GW (the 2022 figure), not 100+24.
Also you are using figures from the Slashdot article and comparing them to a percentage from Wikipedia, both of which are bound to be written against different levels of solar power generation. You can't say directly the 2.89% is related to the 24GW from the article here, you'd have to adjust first for the difference in base.
I'm not saying my estimate is exact, it
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Confusing GW and GWh
Using the wrong case for an unit.
Yeah.
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A comment almost completely devoid of information, probably because you'd rather not get it wrong yourself and look like a dick...
OK so attempt 2...
775 Mtoe = 9 013 250 GWh
according to
https://www.iea.org/statistics... [iea.org]
So to get GWh from a 100GW power station...
100GW x 24 x 365 = 876 000GWh
100 * 876,000 / 9,013,250 = 9%
which is still not 23%
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That's when it is needed, yes. Electrical power consumption at night is quite a bit lower.
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This is pretty easy to disprove
https://www.agora-energiewende... [agora-energiewende.de]
I took a couple of days of the last week as an example and you can see pretty clearly the difference between the power requirements during the day and during the night. As you may or may not know, Germany is a nation that has some real industrial output.
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Oh, and India is trying to use this one source of solar power to power their entire country, is that it? Once this is finished they're going to demolish all other power plants? No point in adding capacity during the peak usage times, right?
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Better tell Germany, because they're about to convert a coal mine to do exactly that with a huge pipe running in a 10 mile underground loop for storing that water underground. They're going to add pumps to pump water to the surface during times of generation excess, and then when generation is lower they run the water back down into the mine reservoir and send it through a turbine on the way. So, quick, Slashdot expert, save Germany and tell them that this isn't going to work because the coal mine wasn't
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But the power lakes can hold much more energy, and as such it is already being used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
175 Gigowatts ? (Score:1)
175 gigowatts.
Great Scott!
What the hell is a gigowatt?
How could I have been so careless?
175 gigowatts!
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There is an economic imperative for them too. Europe, Japan and the US have all made money exporting energy generation technology. Now there is a big shift to safe renewables that don't have any of the old down sides (pollution, CO2, requiring nuclear fuel/disposal/regulation) there is a big opportunity to sell vast amounts of new technology and engineering knowledge.
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Simply a matter of industrial economic development. Clearly the India government wants to promote the manufacture of solar panels in India for export to the rest of the world in very large volumes. So it is seeking to promote the development of major very high production level solar panel plants. So it is putting out a tender which will promote that development to fill that contract and then go on to export panels as well as fill local need at a low manufacture cost per kWh of energy produced.
This might se
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We are already past the c02 limit for a 1.5 C temperature increase. We blow thru the 2.0 C temperature increase in 2025. To not do so, we would have to lower our carbon output by 90%.
I just don't see that happening.
In the mean time, natural gas extraction is leading to very sharp increases in methane.
Nothing short of directly removing CO2 is going to work. And we are not even close to reduction much less extraction.
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I'm not denying that people's choices matter, but technology, legislation and economics have a much larger role to play.
Being a vegan is great if you are into it, but that one spiritual retreat a year to Nepal or business trip to Paris is going to totally wipe out any CO2 reduction you've achieved by eating fresh local produce, cycling to work, showering every other day, recycling religiously and taking your own bags to the supermarket.
Until we can firmly pin the real cost of CO2 on the activities that prod
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Well we don't have the technology yet but wouldn't it be nice if we had something powered by renewable energy that directly produced graphene from the air in amounts sufficient to make a difference?
For one thing, we could use it to replace the sand we are running out of for concrete (can't use desert sand- it's spherical).
If we do get a technology that does it, then we will have the problem on the other end as carbon extractors deny co2 levels are getting too low. But that's probably over 100 years away.
A
Capacity? (Score:4, Informative)
That was from 2013... (Score:4, Interesting)
What matters is actual output, and in India that is around 15-19%. So installing 100 GW of "capacity" really means installing around 15-19 GW of actual generation
That's an interesting point, but that data seems to be from 2013 so it seems like upcoming generation would be quite a bit better.
This article on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] indicates that even currently solar generation exceeds the 2% figure you gave, it's at 2.9% now - so essentially an order of magnitude expansion should be a pretty decent amount of actual output.
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From GP's link, solar generation in '16-'17 was 12.08 GWh of solar power, which was 0.98% of their utility generation that year. This was from 12.3 GW [wikipedia.org] of installed capacity, of which 45% was added in that time period, so contributed partially. That suggests 100 GW should produce somewhere between 98 and 178 GWh, or 7.9 - 14.4% of 2017's total.
And since the 100 GW described in TFA is on top of the existing target of 100 GW by 2022, you can probably double that (though of course total demand is also likely to
Nice, but... (Score:1)
Nice, but how about getting some toilets?
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That's not how you spell "street".
Let's do the numbers (Score:3)
100 GW sounds a lot. By the time this is installed the population of India will be roughly 1 billion. So this gives each Indian roughly 100W of installed capacity. This will generate 400 Wh of electricity per day (pV generates about 4 hours of nameplate power output per day), so it'll run a lightbulb, and maybe half of a small fridge.
Wow, that's transformational.
Now, fair enough, if you don't have a lightbulb and a fridge that sounds jolly nice, but it isn't exactly energy nirvana is it?
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If you read even the first paragraph of TFA you'd see that this 100 GW is on top of the already-existing 100 GW target by 2022. And of course they're adding wind, hydro, and nuclear as well.
More important than the fridge would be energy to power a cooker instead - which could save 1.3 million lives a year [businessworld.in].
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Well, a cooker could be powered directly with focused sunlight.
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And indeed they are - the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy has been promoting solar cookers in India since the 80s. They're fairly widely used, but have a number of disadvantages - can't cook at night, or on cloudy days (though many parts of India typically get 300 sunny days a year), smaller units have to be used outside, cooking rate is hard to control, and they're slow, often taking 2 or 3 hours to cook a meal.
But more recent developments have added thermal storage in the form of heated steam or other
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If you want to be that cynical: the statistical value [wikipedia.org] of a human life (in terms of health costs, lost productivity etc) in India was US$94,721, according to the WHO [who.int] for 2004. For 1.3 million lives that's $123 billion every year - a pretty sizable chunk of their GDP.
Re: Let's do the numbers (Score:2)
That 94K figure isn't the yearly value. Your math is broken
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In one year, 1.3 million lives are cut short by air pollution, preventing each of those people from producing a nominal average of $94k over the rest of their lives. The lost productivity is $123 billion, not for that year, but accumulated over the next few decades.
The next year, another 1.3 million lives are cut short - resulting in an additional $123 billion productivity loss over those same decades. And more the next year, and the next.
You're right in that the $123B isn't the loss for a single year, so p
Re: Let's do the numbers (Score:2)
Your math is broken too, mate :)
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Let's do the numbers
India's total installed capacity is 340GW. Even with solar's lower capacity factor than most other things, this is still a very substantial amunt extra available.
Now, fair enough, if you don't have a lightbulb and a fridge that sounds jolly nice, but it isn't exactly energy nirvana is it?
The poverty line in India is about 50 cents per day. You decide if that would be trasformational.
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The poverty line in India is about 50 cents per day.
Do you really believe that? Do you think you can get 3 good meals and a roof over your head anywhere for 50 cents?
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> Do you think you can get 3 good meals and a roof over your head anywhere for 50 cents?
No, that's why it's called "poverty".
Duh.
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50 cents buys about a pound of uncooked rice in a market in India
That is nonsense. I obviously don't know the price in India, but it is likely a tenth or even less than in Germany. E.g. in Thailand you pay for a sack of rice about $10, to heavy to carry for an ordinary person.
Food prices, especially unprepared, vary easily by a factor between 10 and 100 from country to country.
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They cost the same everywhere
No they don't.
Why the fuck would they? You never heard about the fact that not every food grows everywhere? That wages are different? That transport actually costs something?
An Avocado in Germany is about $4. It does not grow here.
A sack of Avocado in Thailand, about 25 pieces, is $2.
Same for rice and any other food like Mango, Papaya, Shrimps/Prawns, Octopus or actually any sea food etc. It gets even more interesting if you go eating in a restaurant. In Thailand I pay for a k
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30 Baht is 90 $cents ... which super market did you check? Sounds quite expensive for Thailand. :D
OTOH I believe cheap rice in Germany is about 4Euro per kg. Unless you buy a 25kg sack in an Asia Shop
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3 good meals, yes. ...
Most of the time of the year you don't need a roof
Anyway, I guess the parent meant: if there is more power available, likely more people gets power, it does not necessarily mean that those who already have power can spent more.
Arrogant first worlders (Score:3)
100 GW sounds a lot. By the time this is installed the population of India will be roughly 1 billion.
"Will be"? The current population of India is roughly 1.324 billion today. Are you thinking India will lose 300 million citizens in the near future?
So this gives each Indian roughly 100W of installed capacity.
Are you trolling or idiotic? They already consume 751W per capita [wikipedia.org]. Using your (incorrect) math that would be an addition of over 11% to their generating capacity so that's far from trivial.
Wow, that's transformational.
Yes it is. It would provide stable power to a lot of people who don't already have access to reliable power. That is a LOT of people in India. 58% of India's population
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It's 100GW on top of the 175GW of renewable capacity they already have in place, which is a mixture of sources (not just solar). That is on top of all the non-renewable power they already have too.
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but it isn't exactly energy nirvana is it?
You're right, it's a silly idea. India is too far gone, there's no point in trying to build powerplants there.
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We'll sequester you, fart, and use that instead!
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True, it'll be very expensive to replace them all. But it's quite a sight to behold... the clock turns midnight on their 25th anniversary, and they just crumble into dust and drift away in the wind.
We should definitely build nuclear power stations instead. They don't have any kind of limited lifespan, or require any kind of maintenance or additional costs to deal with any byproducts like those terrible solar panels.
Real reason - a stable demand for panels (Score:5, Insightful)
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> It is important for India to not have their future energy production dependent on a country like China.
Why? Most of the system comes from other countries. Everything from the copper to the aluminium to the quartz. So why should the panel as a whole be different?
Canada has lots of power. Most of it is built out using parts from the US. I'm trying to understand what problem this caused because I can't see one.
You must be joking (Score:1)
All the materials you mentioned are raw materials. You cannot make them. You mine them. India wants to be the one to turn raw materials into finished products. Much like Indonesia wants to smelt the copper and stop exporting the ore.
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Yes, but the production of the energy itself is under our control.
Think of it as "buying a software license that works forever" vs "paying a monthly fee to be able to use the software you need".
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Take the deserts and Alaska out and count only livable land and its pretty similar in size to the US. CIA fact book India has 58% arable land. USA has 16.8%. When you consider USA is roughly 3 times as bigger (most of it is Alaska) the actual livable land is similar. India still has 3 times the population so its densely populated (not as densely populated as France, Germany or Japan but its dense)
100 gigawatts?! (Score:1)
Are they also planning to buy 82 DeLorean cars?
A Big target (Score:1)
Re:What a priority (Score:5, Insightful)
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What do you mean by "Lucas electrics", the only Lucas I can think of is motor industry based.
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> What do you mean by "Lucas electrics", the only Lucas I can think of is motor industry based.
http://www.mez.co.uk/lucas.html
They made all sorts of things, but are worst known for their motoring products, yes.
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Ah, I'd never heard Lucas being synonymous with poor quality.
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Oh please. Just watch the last Star Wars movies.
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You've never heard of "Lucas Electrics, The Prince of Darkness"?
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There's an old joke: "Why do the British drink warm beer? Because they keep it in Lucas refrigerators."
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Power grid? This is a country plagued with Lucas electrics from their time dominated by the UK. The only people who have it worse are the Lebanese who not only have that fabulous British wiring but also benefit from French plumbing!
Electric shower heads - now that's like combining the electric chair with a Swedish sauna room
http://trialandstyle.com/edito... [trialandstyle.com]?
Re:What a priority (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, more energy will help with infrastructure problems and should be a priority.
Re:What a priority (Score:5, Insightful)
what an idiot. the country has pollution levels through the roof, inefficient coal plants built in the 60s and is at least attempting to move in a positive direction to reduce pollution; and our resident genius gets to talk about their trains and corruption. I assume they should put everything on hold till they fix trains and corruption? what do you say about Trumpism then...
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Sounds like the US. What are they focusing on? Space Marines...
What, you don't want your kid joining the Mobile Infantry so they can become a citizen?
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No, more like unifying the disparate Air Force, Navy and Army space commands.
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I'm sorry this is just wrong... Trump was trying to distract people from the child abuse that he ordered in name of border security because no one believed his claims that he had to do it because it was the law, or his next claim that the Democrats made him do it, or his final claim that Obama was so much worse than he was, so he finally had to switch to "look at the shiny space marines!" so his followers could continue ignoring his heartless incompetence.
I'm only correcting you because It's important to k
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Didn't you get the memo?
If you are opposed to unfettered illegal immigration you're a mouth breathing racist.
If you support the notion that a nation has the right and obligation to its citizens to maintain a border, you're a mouth breathing racist.
Let everyone in who wants to come, then tax the vanishing middle class into oblivion to pay for it. Else you're a mouth breathing racist.
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Letâ(TM)s just for arguments sake say that the US doesnâ(TM)t have those problems. What do they focus on? Separating children from their sex trafficers... way to make the world a better place.
FTFY. You do realize that is why the Democrats passed the law, right?
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I guess an electric train runs well on solar power ...
(*facepalm*)
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We are talking about India not Indiana
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You haven't played Sim City have you? Or are you one of those people who don't understand why the buildings aren't being built despite having roads and trains but no power plant?
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Oy
Sim city isn't real life my friend, solar actually works during the night there not so much in this world.
What I do know is that the countries with the largest percentage of the generating base derived from renewables have the highest retail electric costs in the world. So to borrow your analogy, the data centers and heavy industry powered by electricity rather than coal aren't going to be built because they will be too costly to operate, and the country won't be able to fully exploit developing internal
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Sim city isn't real life my friend
No it's not. But since you had no real life experience either I was hoping you at least had some relatable experience as to why your comment was silly.
What I do know is that the countries with the largest percentage of the generating base derived from renewables have the highest retail electric costs in the world.
That is what is called observer bias. The countries with the highest percentage of renewables are also countries which had a first mover disadvantage adopting at the time expensive technologies. The countries with the highest percentage of renewables are also countries which have ALWAYS had high electricity costs due to the local peculiarities and infrastruct
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No it's not. But since you had no real life experience either I was hoping you at least had some relatable experience as to why your comment was silly.
I'm an electrical engineer and you are using a video game as your experience.
That is what is called observer bias.
No in your case this is what's called innumeracy. The inability to process numerical information.
One of the cost cutting projects I put in was to install solar panels on the roofs of the switchrooms to run the airconditioning units because it was cheaper than the wholesale cost of electricity from our own turbines.
Well bragging you're inefficient is hardly an argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Combined cycle natural gas runs $53/mwh vs solar at $73/mwh of course that doesn't cover the fact you have to use something besides solar at night.
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