The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : A way to lower energy-intensive lifestyle

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 04, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

A way to lower energy-intensive lifestyle

Staff Reporter

Chennai: Chennai has not invested much in public transport and promoting mass transport is an excellent way to lower an energy-intensive lifestyle, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, M.R. Srinivasan, said on Thursday.

He was delivering a talk on "Energy Security", organised by the Triplicane Cultural Academy and the Kasturi Srinivasan Library. He said that conservation of energy could be effected by a shift from carbon to non-carbon sources of energy and also from a shift in lifestyle options to consume less energy. People are getting used to having two or three cars, running their air-conditioner all the time — but are not really looking into the fact if energy will be sustainable for a population of one billion that the country had got.

Other factors such as living in homes very far away from the work place, setting out on leisure travel to distant locations — polluting the stratosphere with more air travel and a built-in obsolescence in replacing cars and refrigerators instead of repair and reuse — contribute to energy wastage, he said.

In terms of cars and other consumer goods, there need not be a dependence on employment generation only through production, but also through maintenance, he added. Power generation with coal must be more efficient in super-critical boilers, integrated coal gasification combined cyclic plants, coal-bed methane in underground gasification and other clean coal technologies through carbon sequestration and a shift from carbon to non-carbon sources are some solutions for energy conservation at the macro level, he said.

R. Poornalingam, chairperson of the State Police Commission said that just as competition was introduced in the telecommunication, automobile and other sectors, the energy sector would also benefit by competition through privatisation. Among those who participated was G. Narayanaswamy, president of the Academy.

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