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Kerala and alternative energy resources

Swaraj is full-fledged national liberation, a leap forward that is geared to holistic democratic development. None shall be denied such an opportunity to flower and share in the country’s progress. This is a condition precedent to the real fulfilment of the needs and comforts, and ensuring the quality of life, of the entire citizenry, particularly those from the weaker sections. All the resources that can promote energy generation have to be kindled because development demands electricity or other forms of energy. This is thus the focus of India on the march.

Large-scale advances and improved production will be possible equally in village and city if more electricity is available. Advanced industrialisation cannot be achieved without a robust agrarian base. Indeed, agriculture, industry and technology cannot be divisively developed and none of them can be accelerated without abundant electrification and popular cooperation in extenso, using their creative faculties. Electrification plus people’s participation is socially sensitive, economically locomotive democracy in its egalitarian glory.

In this context, it is imperative to realise the acute scarcity of extant energy supplies in India at large and in Kerala, and the wisdom of prudent management of energy. First, we must declare an “Energy Emergency.” Kerala now depends on hydel resources as the sole means to produce power for itself. When the monsoon fails, water storage becomes scarce and power shortage drives the State to load-shedding and similar hardships. So we need electricity austerity.

At the same time, plural means of power generation in a pollution-free manner is like asking for the moon since wastage of energy is bound to grow, too.

Energy ‘swaraj’, or self-reliance, is now a necessity. Without power, everything from water supply to cooking and medical radiology will cease. Fans, television sets, air-conditioners, telephones, computers and similar facilities needed to make life bearable will become impossible to use. Even aircraft and trains need power in plenty. The media need power: without power, there can be no culture. The right to life guaranteed by the Constitution will stand negated by the state if power supply stops. And people, the vast poor and the middle class, who cannot own their own generators, will suffer beyond endurance.

It is strange to learn that Kerala (along with a few other backward companions) has no plan to generate power through alternative means. These alternatives range from solar and tidal power to wind farms, biogas and other newly researched and discovered sources. The sun can be a saviour. We idly worship this star but largely ignore solar power, which is clean. Solar energy can abundantly replace hydro, coal, nuclear and other sources of electricity to heat water, cook food and for other purposes, if duly stored. The technology of storing it is a feasible one. At the Tirupati temple, food for thousands of people is cooked daily using solar energy. Other temples have begun to do this, too.

Every five-star hotel and large meeting and eating centre or club where feasts are served frequently should be compelled by law to use solar energy. So, too, large apartment complexes and big individual houses. Biogas that uses garbage is a similar utility. Wealth from waste can be a profitable reality provided the government, from the local level to the central level, overcomes energy illiteracy. This will save dependence on hydel supply.

In a city like Kochi which is full of garbage, for example, biogas produced from garbage can be made obligatory everywhere. Wind farms can be set up in several places. Gold shops and luxury bazaars have air-conditioning, glossy illumination and other avoidable electricity extravagances. Why is the Kerala government, with the Thiruvananthapuram-based Agency for Non-Conventional Energy and Rural Technology (ANERT), an autonomous body of the government under the Department of Power, not utilising solar energy or setting up wind mills and farms?

Nuclear power, with its inherent hazards, is a meaningless menace and a mad craze, dangerous and expensive. It takes years to set up one plant. Why make the country’s national freedom dependent on big power pressure and suffer “dependencia” humiliation? U.S. nuclear barons and President Bush have purchased our artless, innocent Prime Minister’s conscience as an irrevocable commitment.

Nuclear waste is a grave menace and there is an inevitable residue from every reactor — for which even the U.S. has no answer. No patriot, Left, Right or Centre, can conscionably sponsor a nuclear reactor. Indeed, we have enough thorium and unmined uranium. Why beg America as mendicants?

India has perennial, renewable energy from the sun available to it. Shashi Tharoor lucidly said recently, while dealing with solar sources: Let us make haste while the sun shines. His humanist wisdom deserves reading.

In all the brouhaha about the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, not enough attention has been paid to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent announcement of a credible energy plan for India that goes way beyond the nuclear. By far the most welcome component of his six-point plan to increase the country’s reliance on sustainable sources of energy was the declaration that the development of India’s capacity to tap the power of the sun would be central to the strategy.

In this strategy the sun occupies centrestage, the Prime Minister memorably said, “as it should, being literally the original source of all energy.” He added: “We will pool all our scientific, technical and managerial talents, with financial sources, to develop solar energy as a source of abundant energy to power our economy and to transform the lives of our people.” And it was no hyperbole when he said: “Our success in this endeavour will change the face of India.”

Why has this same fine Prime Minister jettisoned this great truth and staked his government’s standing on the nuclear deal with the U.S.? “It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder.”

We have to reduce our dependence on non-renewable sources, and solar power is an obvious answer. We must cut down on carbon dioxide emissions. Greenhouse gases are global terrors. Let us rely on wind farms and other natural sources which will cut down transmission losses and cost the least in the long run. The Law Reforms Commission of Kerala, in proposing a legislative bill, has attempted to articulate the logic of plural renewable processes of infinite power generation as being realistic, pragmatic, native and innocent.

The Kerala government, the Kerala State Electricity Board, and ANERT, seem to be somewhat inactive when it comes to alternative energy generation. The local self-government institutions as well as MPs and MLAs, are being insensitive to the imminent electricity bankruptcy.

It is significant that, notwithstanding the seeming indifference of the State administration to new energy sources, there are several creative proposals that have been put before the government in this regard. A number of private Indian companies are ready to start solar farms, it has been reported.

Ignorance is guilt where public authority fails in its obvious duty even when knowledge is within easy reach. Energy pluralism and popular activism in cooperative functionalism, are a sine qua non of developmental democracy. Load-shedding represents a lame alibi when nature’s power sources remain in slumber without a wake-up call from state power.

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