[Agricultural waste in India is abundant, since
roughly 60 percent of its population relies on agriculture for a living. Sunil
Dhingra, a senior fellow at the Energy Resources Institute (TERI), a
Delhi-based policy center, estimated that India produced 600 million tons of
such “agro-waste” each year, 150 to 200 tons of which are not used. This is “a
big resource that needs to be channelized,” he said.]
By Amy Yee
 |
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Manpreet Romana for The New York Times
Workers collect rice straw from the fields in
Baghoura, a village in northern India.
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GHANAUR,
India — THE hulking power plant set against the green countryside of
Punjab state in northwest India does not look
like a source of renewable energy. Yet filling its stockyard, instead of mounds
of coal, are bales of rice straw. Machines break up the heavy straw cubes as
men with pitchforks hoist fibrous mounds onto a conveyor belt leading to the
power plant. Handkerchiefs cover their faces to protect them from dust swirling
in the air.
This is Punjab Biomass Power, a plant near the
village of Ghanaur that collects the straw collected from farmers tilling the
lush fields of the surrounding countryside. After harvest, they would normally
burn this agricultural waste, inedible to people and animals, to clear fields
for wheat crops, as farmers across India do, and in that way contribute to the
country’s dire air pollution. But at Punjab Biomass, 120,000 tons of rice straw
a year are instead burned to generate 12 megawatts of electricity for the
state’s power grid.
The plant produces emissions, although its
filters reduce the amount that outdoor burning would generate. But such biomass
energy in theory is considered carbon-neutral because of what these plants use
as fuel — like sugar cane pulp and nut shells that took carbon dioxide out of
the atmosphere as it grew. Biomass power plants are eligible for carbon credits
that translate into cash, and Punjab Biomass hopes to eventually earn hundreds
of thousands of dollars a year from the plant.
Yet biomass is far from a solution to the
enormous energy needs of India and its 1.2 billion people. Alternative energy,
like wind, biomass and solar, accounted for less than 8 percent of India’s
power generation in 2009. Still, because India imports about 70 percent of its oil and natural gas and relies on
coal for more than half of its electricity generation, it must consider all
options for energy.
In April, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called
for a doubling of India’s nonconventional energy supply, including biomass,
from 25,000 megawatts in 2012 to 55,000 megawatts by 2017. “Energy is both
scarce and expensive and yet it is vital for development,” said Mr. Singh at
the Clean Energy Ministerial in
New Delhi. Developing countries “have to expand all sources of supply,
including both conventional and nonconventional energy,” he said.
Agricultural waste in India is abundant, since
roughly 60 percent of its population relies on agriculture for a living. Sunil
Dhingra, a senior fellow at the Energy Resources Institute (TERI), a
Delhi-based policy center, estimated that India produced 600 million tons of
such “agro-waste” each year, 150 to 200 tons of which are not used. This is “a
big resource that needs to be channelized,” he said.
Some European countries have already
successfully harnessed biomass energy. In Finland, biomass such as leaves and
wood from its abundant, managed forest industry accounts for 20 percent of the
energy supply, according to the European Biomass Industry Association. Sixteen percent of
Sweden’s energy comes from biomass. And nearly half of upper Austria’s
renewable energy comes from biomass; the region aims to use renewable energy
for all of its heat and energy demand by 2030.
Punjab Biomass began operations in November 2010
after converting the existing coal power plant at the site, an option less
expensive than building a new plant or solar or wind farm. In Britain and other
parts of Europe, some coal-fired plants are converting to biomass to comply
with new European environmental regulations, said David Hostert, an analyst
with Bloomberg New Energy Finance in London.
In India, biomass has the potential to generate
at least 18,000 megawatts of electricity, according to the country’s Ministry
of New and Renewable Energy. Biomass energy can be produced through big power
plants but also in small, rural gasifiers for grass-roots industries like brick
kilns. Mr. Dhingra of TERI estimated that there were 800 to 900 biomass power plants and 3,000
small thermal gasifiers across India.
Biomass energy also generates extra income for
Indian farmers. Punjab Biomass pays 15,000 farmers about 500 rupees, about $8,
per acre of rice straw that would otherwise be burned.
But there are many challenges to expanding
biomass energy, especially collecting, storing and transporting the
agricultural waste to power plants. Most farms are fragmented, without
organized disposal operations, so energy companies need fleets of threshers and
tractors to collect agro-waste from fields. Enough fodder to run a power plant
for 11 months must be collected and stored. Punjab Biomass runs mainly on rice
straw, but it is considering other agro-waste unfit for livestock, like corn
and cotton stalks and sugar cane waste to supplement its current supply.
Biomass is stored in enormous depots and must be
kept dry even in India’s heavy rains. Companies must get clearance for large
swaths of land to store fodder — no easy task in bureaucratic India. Murad Ali
Baig, director of Bermaco Energy Systems, one of the partners in the Punjab
plant, admitted that getting the plant running “should have taken 18 months but
took four years.” The logistics of storing and transporting fodder and
maintaining fuel-guzzling equipment is far more complicated than it seems in
unpredictable India. “It’s been bloody hard work,” said Mr. Baig.
The company is operationally profitable, but
still has losses from its first couple of years of business. Still, the company
aims to build eight more rice-straw energy plants in Punjab state to generate
96 megawatts of electricity by 2017. Across India, Bermaco hopes to set up
about 20 biomass plants generating 240 megawatts during the next three years
and about 1,000 megawatts in the next six years.
While there is potential for biomass energy in
India, the country lacks the efficiency, logistical infrastructure and
investments of countries like Finland. There, the public and private sector
have invested heavily in research and development. Huge warehouses store leaves
and wood to ensure steady, efficient supplies of fodder from well-managed
forests.
In India, biomass “is low-tech, but let’s
invest, like the example we’ve seen in Europe,” Mr. Dhingra of TERI, said.
“Industry, academia and government all work on one platform there. You don’t
see that happening here.”
[India’s 29th state would be in a drought-ridden
inland region that has long felt marginalized by coastal elites, and its
creation would come after years of passionate lobbying by its supporters,
including hunger strikes and scores of suicides. Supporters say that residents
of the coastal Seemandhra region have monopolized state power and public
resources for years, and they believe that the new state will improve their
lives.]
By Ellen Barry
NEW
DELHI — Striking workers shut off electricity and cellphone service to a
large section of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh on Tuesday, as
hundreds of thousands of government employees protested a decision to divide
the state into two parts.
Last week, India’s governing coalition announced
that it would create the new state, Telangana, infuriating many who will be
left in the remaining “rump” of Andhra Pradesh, which stands to lose tax
revenues that flow into the booming city of Hyderabad. The city is now Andhra
Pradesh’s capital but would eventually become Telangana’s after the split. The
police declared a curfew in some areas after protesters blocked major highways
using barricades of burning tires.
A former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh,
Chandrababu Naidu, began a hunger strike on Monday to protest the decision,
telling visitors in a tent outside the state’s offices in New Delhi that the
government’s move was politically motivated.
“If you do it for political gain, nobody will be
convinced,” Mr. Naidu told reporters on Tuesday. “I asked them to sort out the
problem, but they have created a bigger problem.”
Critics say the Indian National Congress, the
governing national party, took the step now because it hoped to cash in on
votes in the newly formed state ahead of general elections in 2014.
India’s 29th state would be in a drought-ridden
inland region that has long felt marginalized by coastal elites, and its
creation would come after years of passionate lobbying by its supporters,
including hunger strikes and scores of suicides. Supporters say that residents
of the coastal Seemandhra region have monopolized state power and public
resources for years, and they believe that the new state will improve their
lives.
But the proposed split — which must still be
approved by the state assembly and passed by both houses of Parliament — deprives
the coastal region of tax revenue flowing from the cluster of industry around
Hyderabad. Opponents of the plan have attacked houses and businesses belonging
to regional leaders of the Congress party.
K. T. Rama Rao, a leader of a political party
that supported the division, blamed regional leaders for mishandling the issue.
He said many politicians who argued passionately in favor of creating
Telangana, and participated in exhaustive debates that led to the decision, are
now opposing it.
“You can’t change your colors seasonally,” he
said. “It is rank political opportunism. The people of Telangana are not
willing to be fooled again and again.”
Opposition to the plan comes mostly from
Seemandhra, whose residents have long migrated to Hyderabad, where many services
came to a halt over the weekend. Journalists in the region reported that bank
machines were no longer supplying currency, and that service to tens of
thousands of cellphones went dead. Hospitals were operating emergency units
with the help of generators, as stores of diesel dwindled, according to Indian
news reports.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
