The dark secret behind India’s solar plan to bring power to all
Like generations before him, the only light Jurdar Thingya has at night in his one-room mud hut in India’s Maharashtra state comes from a small wood fire on the floor. A broken solar panel is all that the 35-year-old farmer has to remind him of the government’s promise to bring electricity to all of India’s villages. Bhamana, population 1,500, is two hours’ walk from the nearest surfaced road, across a river that is impassable for months during the monsoon rains. Like other remote villages, it was powered by renewable energy as part of a drive to take electricity to every community in the state, according to Dinesh Saboo, projects director at Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Co., the power retailer. Maharashtra, home to the financial capital of Mumbai, declared itself fully electrified in 2012, relying on solar panels or small wind turbines to cover remote areas. India considers a village electrified if at least 10 percent of the households and public places such as schools have electricity. But theft and damage have plunged 288 villages and 1,500 hamlets in Maharashtra back into darkness, according to Saboo. “Most of the equipment is either stolen or not working,” he said. “Now we have decided that a majority of these villages will be electrified in the conventional way.” In India, political power and electrical power are closely linked. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which also runs the state government of Maharashtra, was elected in 2014 partly on promises to bring electricity to rural voters. It has pledged to electrify all villages by May 2018 and supply power to every citizen by 2019. Read more on challenges facing efforts to electrify India’s rural population “Rural electrification is one of the most critical issues on which the elections in India are being contested,” said Sandeep Shastri, a political commentator who teaches at Jain University in Bengaluru. “People will weigh the promises of the governments — both federal and state — on the basis of implementation. Their electoral gains will be determined by the credibility of their promises.” Shastri said rural electrification contributed to the landslide win last week of Modi’s party in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s least-developed states, where voters compared the federal government’s efforts with the lack of progress from the incumbent state government. Power Surge There are a lot of votes to be won. In 2014, the World Bank ranked India as home to the world’s largest unelectrified population. Power was either unaffordable, inadequate or non-existent for 240 million people, according to data from the International Energy Agency. An expanding economy and population put the country on track to be the biggest driver of global energy demand through 2040, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. But progress has been patchy. The government has met 77 percent of its target to link villages to power grids, yet only about 14 percent for villages earmarked for off-grid power like solar. Some 47 million rural households are still without electricity, and even those connected to the grid suffer frequent outages. Federal renewable energy secretary Rajeev Kapoor didn’t immediately respond to calls and a text message seeking comments. In 2012, the nation suffered one of the worst blackouts in history when the national grid collapsed, cutting power for two days to almost half the nation’s population. About one in five Indians lacked access to electricity, compared with full electrification in China, the International Energy Agency said in a 2016 report. When the first solar units were installed in Bhamana in 2010, most houses got a small photovoltaic panel connected to a battery that could power a light for five to six hours. Seven years later, only four or five houses still have working lamps. Dead Battery “We have no clue how to fix the equipment,” said Achildar Pesra Pawra, a member of the Bhamana village council. “Some batteries stopped working within months. Others lasted for about two years. Some of the solar panels were broken.” Part of the problem is that the factors that make solar attractive for isolated communities — ease of transport and installation — also make them easy to steal, said Shantanu Jaiswal, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. India plans to expand renewable generation capacity more than three-fold to 175 gigawatts by 2022, with the majority from solar. Almost a quarter of the total will be supplied by rooftop panels. “The instances of theft and destruction of distributed renewable energy appliances has been very prevalent in programs especially run by aid agencies as part of corporate social responsibility or where the government provides a subsidy,” said Jarnail Singh, India director at The Climate Group, a London-based organization promoting low-carbon solutions. ”This is because there is no maintenance of equipment after installation.” Maoist Guerrillas As a result, Maharashtra’s state-owned power retailer is now planning to spend spend 3.85 billion rupees by 2018 to connect many of the isolated villages to the grid. That won’t be easy. Most of the 288 villages that no longer qualify to be called electrified are in mountainous and thickly forested areas. That means getting approval from the forest department to run transmission lines across the land. And in some cases it means finding contractors willing to venture into areas populated with Maoist insurgents. “We are not able to enter some of these areas,” Saboo said. “Many contractors are not prepared to work there and those that are charge very high rates. We are already allowing the highest rates in these areas so that they can get electrified.” For villagers like Thingya, one of the greatest losses from the failure of the solar project is at the village primary school, which was able to light its cavernous classroom even in the dark monsoon days. Now his six children learn in the open air in the dry months and don’t have light to read or study at home. Villager Ardaas Samle Pawra, now 23 and a father of three, gained a few years of secondary
Cabinet okays sale of IOC’s 24% stake in Lubrizol India
The Cabinet today approved sale of state-owned Indian Oil Corp’s (IOC) 24 per cent stake in Lubrizol India Pvt Ltd to Lubrizol Corporation, USA for an undisclosed sum. “The sale will enable IOC to have long term association with its joint venture partner and … Lubrizol India Pvt Ltd (LIPL) to have access to the latest global additive technologies developed by Lubrizol Corporation, USA,” an official statement said. LIPL, where the US firm holds the remaining 76 per cent stake, is in the lube additives business. “The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, today gave its in-principle approval to permit IOC to sell its 24 per cent equity in one of its joint venture companies, Lubrizol India Private Limited (LIPL) to Lubrizol Corporation, USA (LC), the other joint venture partner,” the statement said. Kris Draper Authentic Jersey
Centre made Rs 1.99 lakh crore from levies on petrol, diesel in 2015-16
The massive jump in excise duty on petrol and high speed diesel helped the government mop up nearly 40% of its indirect tax kitty from the two auto fuels in 2015-16, compared to 34% in the previous financial year. A study by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) showed that Union excise duty collection shot up almost 70% from Rs 1.69 lakh crore during 2013-14 to Rs 2.87 lakh crore in 2015-16, with a majority of the contribution being from petrol, diesel, cigarettes and gutka. The indirect tax kitty includes duties from customs, central excise and service tax. Excise revenue from petroleum products, which made up for 52% of collections in 2013-14, went up to almost 69% during 2015-16 as the government resorted to a massive increase in levies in the wake of falling global prices. The central excise duty on petrol and high speed diesel increased from Rs 1.2 per litre and Rs 1.46 per litre to Rs 8.95 per litre and Rs 7.96 per litre respectively during the last two financial years. Revenue from petroleum products went up from Rs 88,000 crore in 2013-14 to Rs 1.99 lakh crore in 2015-16. Tax on sin goods (mainly tobacco products) at Rs 21,000 crore was second highest contributor to indirect taxes. Compared to countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, India has one of the highest retail prices of fuel oil in the subcontinent. The high price of petrol and diesel in India was contrary to the international trend in crude oil prices that crashed from a high of $112 a barrel in 2014 to as low as $30. Though the lower oil prices substantially reduced India’s oil bill as the country depends on 80% imports, domestic prices were kept high by increasing central excise duties. The excess revenue earned was meant to fund government’s social sector schemes. The CAG, which tabled its report in Parliament on Friday, however, highlighted the issue by pointing out how the government has been losing major revenue by giving exemptions to industry. The revenue forgone on account of different exemptions come up to more than Rs 2 lakh crore a year which the auditor has said need to be rationalised. The revenue forgone for FY2016 on excise duties was Rs 2.25 lakh crore — Rs 2.06 lakh crore as general exemptions and Rs 19,000 crore as area-based exemptions. This was over 78% of total revenue earning from central excise. The auditor has observed that though the main objective behind issue of exemption orders is to deal with circumstances of exceptional nature, but this objective was not properly defined. “As such, the duty forgone on account of issue of special exemption orders is not being calculated towards revenue forgone figures,” it noted. Paul Hornung Jersey
ONGC to invest Rs 21,500-cr in India’s deepest gas find
State-owned ONGC will invest over Rs 21,500 crore to develop India’s deepest gas discovery by 2022-23, helping it more than double output from its prime KG basin block. Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), which had last year firmed up an investment of Rs 34,012 crore (USD 5.076.37 billion) in bringing to production 10 oil and gas discoveries in its Bay of Bengal block KG-DWN-98/2 (KG-D5), plans to invest another Rs 21,528.10 crore (USD 3.2 billion) in developing the ultra-deepsea UD-1 find. “We have submitted to the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons a declaration of commerciaility (DoC) for the UD-1 find. We will submit a final investment plan, called the field development plan, by end-2017 and hope to bring the discovery to production by 2022-23,” ONGC Director (Offshore) Tapas Kumar Sengupta told PTI. ONGC plans to drill nine wells on the discovery that lies in water depths of 2,400-3,200 metres and will produce a peak output of 19 million standard cubic metres per day. The company had previously decided to develop other discoveries in KG-D5 block and leave the UD-1 find in the same block for a later date as it thought there was no technology available to produce gas from such water depths. Sengupta said that there are consultants who have showed to ONGC that discoveries deeper than UD-1 have been put to production in recent times, particularly in Gulf of Mexico. “A recent expression of interest (EoI) meeting we had for developing the KG finds saw several consultants offering solutions for such water depths,” he said. ONGC is in the process of appointing a consultant who will assist in developing the UD-1 discovery. The 7,294.6 sq km deepsea KG-D5 block, which sits next to Reliance Industries’ flagging KG-D6 fields, has been broadly categorised into Northern Discovery Area (NDA – 3,800.6 sq km) and Southern Discovery Area (SDA – 3,494 sq km). The NDA has 11 oil and gas discoveries while SDA has the nation’s only ultra-deepsea gas find of UD-1. These finds have been clubbed into three groups – Cluster-1, Cluster-II and Cluster-III. Last year, the company finalised a USD 5.07 billion plan for developing the Cluster-II finds by 2019-20. First gas production is envisaged by June 2019 and oil would start flowing from March 2020, he said. From Cluster-II, a peak oil output of 77,305 barrels per day is envisaged within two years of start of production. Gas output is slated to peak to 16.56 million standard cubic metres per day by end-2021. Sengupta also said that Culster-1 field will be developed at an additional investment of Rs 4,259.59 crore and will produce about 3 mmscmd of gas. Cluster-2A mainly comprises oil finds of A2, P1, M3, M1 and G-2-2 in NDA which can produce 77,305 bpd (3.86 million tonnes per annum) and 3.81 mmscmd of gas. Cluster 2B, which is made up of four gas finds — R1, U3, U1, and A1 in NDA — envisages a peak output of 12.75 mmscmd of gas. Peak output is likely to last seven years, he said. Sam Bradford Womens Jersey