{"id":446,"date":"2012-10-04T12:38:23","date_gmt":"2012-10-04T16:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/a-billion-people-on-solar-india.html"},"modified":"2012-10-04T12:38:23","modified_gmt":"2012-10-04T16:38:23","slug":"a-billion-people-on-solar-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/a-billion-people-on-solar-india.html","title":{"rendered":"A billion people on solar: India"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\n\"Figure<\/a>\nTwo professors in India have done the math and found that\nthere’s plenty of available land in India (much of it on rooftops)\nto power its billion people on solar energy alone.\nAnd solar uses less water than nuclear or coal, also as we already knew for the U.S.\n<\/p>\n

\nToday in The Hindu,\n\nIndia can meet energy needs sans N-power: Study<\/a>,\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nAccording to their study, 4.1 per cent of the total uncultivable and\n\n\"Figure<\/a>\nwaste land area in India is enough to meet the projected annual\ndemand of 3,400 terawatt-hour (TWh) by 2070 by solar energy alone (1\nterawatt-hour per year equals 114 megawatts). The land area required\nwill be further reduced to 3.1 per cent \u201cif we bring the other\npotential renewable energy sources of India into picture\u201d,\nthey claim. They conclude that land availability is not a limiting\nconstraint for the solar source as believed. According to their\nstudy, 4.1 per cent of the total uncultivable and waste land area in\nIndia is enough to meet the projected annual demand of 3,400\nterawatt-hour (TWh) by 2070 by solar energy alone (1 terawatt-hour\nper year equals 114 megawatts). The land area required will be\nfurther reduced to 3.1 per cent \u201cif we bring the other\npotential renewable energy sources of India into picture\u201d,\nthey claim. They conclude that land availability is not a limiting\nconstraint for the solar source as believed.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nThe graph above shows land occupation needed to generate 1 gigawatt hour (1GWh)\nfor each of coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar.\nIt is Figure 3 from the actual study,\n\nIs land really a constraint for the utilitzation of solar energy in India?<\/a>\nby H. Mitavachan and J. Srinivasan, Current Science, Vol. 103, No. 2, pp. 163-168, 25 July 2012.\nMore from the Hindu article, with graphs from the journal article:\n<\/p>\n\n\n

\n

\n\n\"Figure<\/a>\nCoal power plants not only transform the land around the facility\nbut also require land for mining coal and its upstream processing,\nthe authors note. An average dam displaces 31,340 persons and\nsubmerges 8,748 hectares of land. The direct land footprint of a\nnuclear power plant includes power plant area, buffer zone, waste\ndisposal area and the land that goes into mining uranium.\n<\/p>\n

\n\u201cOur study shows that solar power plants require less land in\ncomparison to hydro-power plants and are comparable with coal and\nnuclear energy power generation when life-cycle transformations are\nconsidered,\u201d Mr. Srinivasan said.\n<\/p>\n

\n\n\"Figure<\/a>\nWhile nuclear and fossil fuel-based technologies must continuously\ntransform some land to extract the fuels or dispose of the waste,\nthis is not the case with solar plants. In fact, the same land used\nfor PV solar power plants can be utilised for other purposes like\ngrazing.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe roof-top solar power technology, along with that proposed by\nIISc professors, \u201cwill be able to meet most of the electricity\ndemand, and has the potential to transform the power sector,\u201d\nsays Shankar Sarma, a power policy analyst and author of forthcoming\nbook Integrated Power Policy.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n\n\"Figure<\/a>\nIt’s like the answer to the old Georgia Power misinformation\nthat it would take clearing land the size of Atlanta to provide\nsolar power for Atlanta.\nWe have cleared area like that already: it’s called Atlanta!\nAnd it’s not just land use.\nThe paper also demonstrates that\nsolar also uses much less water than coal or nuclear.\nWe’d already seen\n\nthat result for the U.S.<\/a>\nNow Mitavachan and Srinivasan have found the same thing for India:\nsolar uses little land or water, compared to other power sources,\nand there’s enough available land in India to power its entire population\nof a billion people.\nLess land will be required for solar if it’s\nmixed with wind and a bit of hydro, and maybe a tiny amount of natural gas,\n\nas studies have already found for the U.S.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\n-jsq\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two professors in India have done the math and found that there’s plenty of available land in India (much of it on rooftops) to power its billion people on solar energy alone. And solar uses less water than nuclear or coal, also as we already knew for the U.S. Today in The Hindu, India can […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[216,265,104,23,289,24,55],"tags":[1634,8753,1633,1626,1624,8755,1631,1627,1623,392,1630,1632,1622,1629,1628,8737,1026,1131,8713,8758,8714,1625,8727],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coal","category-energy-efficiency","category-nuclear","category-renewable-energy","category-science","category-solar","category-water","tag-25-july-2012","tag-coal","tag-current-science","tag-efficiencies","tag-energy","tag-energy-efficiency","tag-h-mitavachan","tag-httpcontent-ebscohost-compdf27_28pdf20121e2z25jul1279344844-pdf","tag-hydroelectric","tag-india","tag-is-land-really-a-constraint-for-the-utilitzation-of-solar-energy-in-india","tag-j-srinivasan","tag-land","tag-land-occupation","tag-land-transformation","tag-nuclear","tag-photovoltaic","tag-pv","tag-renewable-energy","tag-science","tag-solar","tag-source","tag-water"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-7c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}