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Global solar energy production is taking a major hit due to dust and atmospheric particulate matter, according to a new study. The airborne particles and their accumulation on solar cells are cutting energy output by more than 25 per cent in certain parts of the world. The study, which appeared in Environmental Science and Technology Letters journal on June 23, said that the regions that are hit the hardest are also the regions that have invested the most in solar energy installation. The regions include: China. India and Arabian Peninsula. "We always knew these pollutants were bad for human health and climate change, but now we've shown how bad they are for solar energy as well," says Michael Bergin, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University and lead author of the study. "My colleagues in India were showing off some of their rooftop solar installations, and I was blown away by how dirty the panels were. I thought the dirt had to affe...

India's demand for electricity is seeing a steady rise. With an increasing number of villages being connected to the grid, this demand is only set to accelerate in the coming years. Currently, around 80 per cent of India’s electricity supply comes from coal-based power. But the sector has been facing a difficult time over the past few years. The energy needs of consumers in remote villages, where the grid has just reached, as well as in rich urban areas are not being met since power distribution companies (discoms) do not have money to buy sufficient power from generating companies. The accumulated losses of state discoms stood at Rs 4 lakh crore in 2014-15, as per the Power Finance Corporation. The result is: millions have no electricity; an equally large number gets limited supply and practically everyone else suffers from periodic power cuts. At the other end, due to the inability of distressed discoms to buy power, power plants are not generating electricity as per their c...

The global demand for coal fell for the second year in a row, according to a study by BP, a multinational oil and gas company. In 2016, global consumption declined by 53 million tonnes or 1.7 per cent, reflecting a shift in the fuel mix away from coal towards lower carbon fuels. The largest dip in coal use was recorded in two of its largest consumers—China and USA. Consumption in the UK more than halved, falling by 52.5 per cent. The country closed down its last three underground coal mines and its consumption has reduced to levels seen during the industrial revolution, some 200 years ago. US’s power sector its first-ever coal free day in April 2017, going a whole day without producing electricity from coal. World coal production fell by 6.2 per cent, the largest decline on record, largely dictated by decline in China (where production fell by 7.9 per cent) and USA (where production fell by 19 per cent). The trend, which up until four years ago was the largest source of energy dem...

The Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), a global renewable energy multi-stakeholder policy network, published its Renewables 2017 Global Status Report (GSR) in Beijing, China this week. This yearly publication provides comprehensive overview of the renewable energy (RE) sector and market covering power, heating and cooling and transportation sectors. RE contributed to an estimated 19.3 per cent of global energy consumption. Most of the new RE capacity was installed in developing countries, mostly in China. In fact, China has been the largest developer of RE in power and heat sector over the past eight years. However, the share of bio-energy in total primary energy consumption has remained more or less the same as 2005, despite a 21 per cent rise in overall energy demand over the last 10 years. Power sector RE installed capacity saw its largest annual increase (161 gigawatts) in 2016 of. Compared to 2015, the global capacity increased by almost 9 per ...

The working of a solar tree is much like that of a real one—leaf-like solar panels connected through metal branches using sunlight to make energy. Availability of land of installing solar panels on a large scale is often a hurdle in the progress of renewable energy. A solution to this is planting solar trees, which are more ergonomic, using little space. Solar trees are complementary to rooftop solar systems, or other green building measures, symbolizing these larger investments and their environmental benefit. The Solar tree panels charge batteries during the day. At dusk, the tree automatically switches on LED lights. It is programmed to regulate the amount of light it produces. Solar trees are flexible and rotate to face the sun and produce maximum possible amount of energy using a technique called “spiralling phyllataxy”. Its calculated rotations allow even the lowermost solar panels to receive ample sunlight for electricity production. It can also be used in street lighting a...

Janet Musyoka is a fuel pump operator at a remote shopping centre some 100 kilometres from Nairobi, Kenya. Till 2015, she had to store the fuel above the ground and dispense it manually as there was no electricity to pump it up from underground storage tanks. This was dangerous as the fuel could easily catch fire due to stray sparks. Musyoka would keep applying for a power connection from national utility company Kenya Power, but was often dissuaded by the quotations of over US $5,000 for setting up the power lines. Things changed that year when a UK electricity mini-grid company, Steama Co, set up a solar energy generation unit, storing the energy in batteries and distributing it through a micro-grid to more than 100 customers around the trading centre. Electricity now allows Musyoka to use a modern fuel pump to dispense fuel, making her work less cumbersome and turning it into a thriving enterprise. Musyoka represented an estimated 600 million people in Africa who do not have ac...

Indiana gets 2440 hours of sunshine per year. That’s higher than New York, Alaska or Ohio. Nevada, located close to the West Coast, gets 3646 hours of sunshine in 365 days. People in both these states are keen on switching to solar energy or meet at least some percentage of energy needs. However, hurdles are being thrown at them time and again. Although coal is the biggest source of electricity in Indiana, renewable energy sector employs far more people. The solar energy sector in Indiana employs nearly 3866 people, three times the natural gas sector (1378). But even then, Republican Governor Eric Holcomb signed a bill that cuts incentives for rooftop solar, giving a huge blow to solar installers and their customers. Areas of concern Currently, if rooftop solar owners generate more electricity than they use, the power utility buys excess power at the retail rate—around 11¢ per kilowatt-hour(kWh). This is known as net metering. However, according to the new law, the utility would...

Energy access remains a huge problem for most people living on the African continent. More than 600 million out of a population of about 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa don’t have reliable electricity access. The Conversation Although sub-Saharan Africa has about 13% of the world’s population, about 48% are without energy access. Only seven countries in the sub-region – Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa – can boast of 50% access rates. And, with the exception of South Africa, the energy consumption rate is 150 kilowatt per capita, way below emerging market estimates. It’s been projected that sub-Saharan Africa will require approximately 1,600 terawatt-hours of electricity by 2040. This estimate is four times more than 2010 usage. It’s based on “a fivefold increase in GDP, a doubling of the population, electricity-access levels reaching more than 70% by 2040, and increased urbanisation”. At current deployment rates it will be 2080...

Renewable energy (RE) is the biggest mitigation tool to combat climate change and limit average global temperature rise to below 2°C, as targeted in the Paris Agreement. Countries have also included RE development in their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). The transition to renewable is led by three countries—India, China and United States of America—that together account for 50 per cent of emissions from energy sector (See Table 1). A report by Allianz Climate and Energy Monitor called “Deep Dive”, says “Investments in electricity supply in China and the US need to roughly double, in India even triple over the next decades to have a fair chance to remain ‘well below 2°C’ warming boundary set in the Paris Agreement.” But the three countries appear to be adopting three very different policy approaches to renewable energy. In India and China, policies are favourable for renewables, driven not only by climate action, but other reasons as well. The new administrati...

India has huge capacity to develop renewable energy infrastructure. However, wind and solar resources are spatially heterogeneous across India, finds a study conducted by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—a member of the national laboratory system supported by the US Department of Energy. India has set a target of developing 175GW of renewable energy by 2022 and also 40 per cent of total power generation from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030. For this to happen, the country needs to overcome economic and siting challenges, along with power system challenges. What’s the objective of the study? The study, conducted by the International Energy Studies Group from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, used Multi-criteria Analysis for Planning Renewable Energy (MapRE) methodological framework. The broader objective was to “spatially identify the amount and quality of wind and utility-scale solar (a solar facility that generates power and feeds the grid sup...

Installed capacity of renewable energy has touched the 2,000-gigawatt-milestone in 2016, with an unprecedented installation of 161.02 GW during the year. According to the data released by International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in their report Renewable Capacity Statistics 2017 last week, the record increase in installation can be attributed largely to increase in solar capacity across the globe. Renewable energy installed capacity worldwide in Gigawatts (Source: IRENA - Renewable Capacity Statistics 2017) Renewable energy installed capacity worldwide in Gigawatts (Source: IRENA - Renewable Capacity Statistics 2017) “We are witnessing an energy transformation taking hold around the world, and this is reflected in another year of record breaking additions in new renewable energy capacity,” said IRENA Director-General Adnan Amin during a press release. “This growth in deployment emphasizes the increasingly strong business case for renewables which also have multiple socio-eco...

Majority of Africa’s population still lives without electricity or connection to the grid. As a way to pull them out of darkness, a new report released by Africa Progress Panel (APP) advocates for investments in mini-grid and off-grid connections. Almost two-thirds of Africa’s population or 620 million people do not have access to electricity, and unless the electrification rate increases, another 45 million individuals will be added to this by 2030. The continent is not just mired with lack of access, but also a deficit of power, the report says. To give a scale of difference, the average American consumes over 13,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity a year and the average European somewhat less. The average African (excluding South Africa) uses just 160kWh. While it seems logical to focus on big projects such as large dams and power pools that will scale up national and regional infrastructure to solve the energy crisis, these projects are expensive, complex and slow to imple...

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a sunlight-powered technology to produce clean fuel from unprocessed biomass. The technology claims producing clean fuel, which is relatively cheap and sustainable, from biomass. The University of Cambridge said in a release that so far, lignocelluloses—the main component in plant biomass—was converted into hydrogen gas through a gasification process, which uses high temperatures for decomposition. However, the technology developed at the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Sustainable SynGas Chemistry uses a rather simple photocatalytic conversion process, said the release. The joint lead author, David Wakerley from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge says, “There's a lot of chemical energy stored in raw biomass, but it is unrefined. So, you cannot expect it to work in complicated machinery such as a car engine.” The new technology converts the long, messy structures that make up biomass into hydro...

Even six years after the Fukushima Daiichi plant suffered a triple meltdown after a huge tsunami struck the north-east coast of Japan, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) which operated the plant and is now responsible for its decommissioning, says it is "clueless" about the situation inside the damaged reactors. Huge quantities of melted nuclear fuel are believed to have accumulated at the bottom of the reactors' containment vessels. But dangerously high radiation has prevented engineers from gauging the state of the fuel deposits. Tepco recently sent a purpose-built robot into the containment vessel of reactor No. 2, but the mission was aborted after it suffered a technical snag due to high radiation. Tepco says a level of 530 sieverts an hour has been recorded inside the vessel. This far exceeds the previous high of 73 sieverts per hour recorded at the reactor following the March 2011 disaster. At this level, a person could die from the briefest of exposures. ...

A report overviewing the solar sector shows positive trends in the industry based on higher solar production than ever before. In 2016, 70 gigawatt (GW) of solar power capacity was added, breaking previous year’s record of 50 GW. The capacity added takes the global solar power generation to nearly 300 GW. The report says that solar costs are now so low that industrial-scale solar plants are providing cheaper power than new fossil and nuclear power. Electricity prices from new coal power stations could rise to Australian $160 per megawatt hour, while solar parks are around $110 per megawatt hour, the report claims. China has taken the lead in solar power addition with 34.2 GW capacity added in 2016. It was followed by United States that added 13 GW and Japan with 10.5 GW more solar capacity. The solar sector employs 2.8 million people globally, outnumbering coal jobs, as per the report. In the United States, solar now provides twice as many jobs as coal. Solar costs have fallen...

In yet another case of shifting goal posts and diluting strict norms, the Centre has reportedly decided to relax the December 2017 deadline for more than 400 thermal plants in the country to comply with the new emission norms notified in December 2015. It has also decided to dilute the standards it had set. Since the new norms were notified more than a year ago, none of the thermal power plants has managed to comply with them, even though a recent study by the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment revealed that coal-fired power sector was one of the most resource wasteful and polluting sectors in the world. See: Green Rating of Coal-based Thermal Power Plants This non-compliance doesn’t echo the optimism Finance Minister Arun Jaitley expressed during his budget speech last week about promoting clean energy. What’s the excuse for non-compliance? In December 2015, the Environment Ministry had laid down emission norms for Nitrogen and Sulphur oxides (NOx and SOx) for t...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s message in the US was loud and clear that renewable energy is the way to go, Goyal said. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) Wednesday said it has signed a memorandum of understanding to form a joint venture (JV) company for setting up a 100 MW offshore wind power project off the Gujarat coast. The MoU was signed between MNRE, National Institute of Wind Energy and a consortium of partners consisting of NTPC, Power Grid Corp, Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency, Power Finance Corp, Power Trading Corp and Gujarat Power Corporation Ltd. “Considering the country’s 7,600 km coast line, opportunities for scaling up offshore wind power projects are humongous,” said Power and MNRE Minister Piyush Goyal, who was present on the occasion. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s message in the US was loud and clear that renewable energy is the way to go, Goyal said. “It dovetails the world’s concerns about climate change and it clearly enhance...

Turbines of the ambitious gas-based power plant in south Tripura is set to roll soon ending months of uncertainty. The 726MW combined cycle plant of the ONGC Tripura Power Corporation (OTPC) at Palatana failed to start in June last after gas booster compressors developed serious technical snags. ‘Problems solved’ “We have set the problems in order. Meantime, one 335MW capacitated turbine has been generating electricity unhindered in the trial run,” OTPC Chairman Managing Director S.K. Dubey told newsmen in Agartala.