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Coal the best bet for India’s power needs

In the Costco warehouse on Canberra’s outskirts there is a bar fridge for sale for $199. It is a modern unit that, according to its energy efficiency rating, will use just 290 kilowatt hours of electricity in a year.

In the Bihar region of India, bounded by Nepal and West Bengal, there are about 103 million people. One hundred and thirty-three years after the construction of the world’s first power station in Pearl Street, Manhattan, the residents of the Bihar enjoy, on average, 179kWh of electricity each year.

In other words, a modern bar fridge will use 60 per cent more electricity than a Bihari citizen will use in a year.

Unfortunately, this problem is not confined to Bihar or other parts of India. An estimated three billion people around the world have limited access to electricity and 1.3 billion of them have no access at all.

There are some prominent Australians who argue that coal is not the answer for India (or any other energy-deprived nation) and that all 50 coal-producing nations around the world should stop building new coalmines.

The sincerity of their views may not be in doubt, but their core proposition, to put it mildly, is not fully thought through. They argue that climate change will harm the most vulnerable.

But denying the most vulnerable access to low-cost, affordable base-load energy will simply ensure that they remain vulnerable and literally in the dark.

The observed truth of human development is that energy access is essential to economic growth. Rationing that access through higher priced and intermittent energy sources will prolong, not ameliorate, their vulnerability.

It also ignores the fact, according to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data, more than 80 per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions come from sources other than coal.

Is it really true that providing energy to the world’s poorest people will exacerbate climate change when their present level of access is 60 per cent less than a bar fridge in a developed country? In any case, the argument is a straw man; coal use and lower emissions are not mutually exclusive.

India, like many nations, is upgrading the technological sophistication of its coal fleet at a rapid rate.

New coal power plants under construction have a carbon footprint up to 50 per cent lower than existing plants. And Malcolm Turnbull is right: the best feedstock for these plants is Australian coal, which by virtue of its higher energy content, pro­duces electricity with 10-20 per cent lower CO2 emissions than product from other exporting nations.

Coal’s opponents argue that renewable sources can provide the energy instead through so-called micro-grids. Not yet it can’t. The BP Statistical Review of Energy reported in June that non-hydro renewables provided just 2.2 per cent of India’s primary energy needs last year. That’s eight days of energy.

The story on the ground is telling. The Scientific American magazine last week highlighted the case of Dharnai, a community of about 3200 people in Bihar that has not had access to electricity for 30 years.

The article noted the “palpable excitement” in the village when Greenpeace activists turned up last year to set up a solar-powered micro-grid.

But, residents said, the problems started almost immediately. When the former chief minister of Bihar state visited to inaugurate the grid, villagers lined up to protest, chanting: “We want real electricity, not fake electricity!” By real, they meant power from the central grid, generated mostly using coal. By fake, they meant solar.

Of course, solar is not fake energy. Solar power will be an important contributor to India’s energy mix across time. And that’s a good thing. But we should not pretend it is the panacea to India’s present energy needs.

MV Ramana, a physicist at Princeton University, told the Scientific American that he encouraged the use of micro-grids for “India’s urban, upper classes of people who can afford it … but not to do it on the backs of people who are poor and can’t afford these experiments”.

There are important ways Australia can contribute. Australia does have a role to play in solving the energy poverty problem in countries such as India while also reducing CO2 emissions. We support an Asian Clean Energy Initiative with a number of components.

First, in concert with other regional nations such as Japan, China and South Korea, we should ensure that India and other developing nations in Asia have access to the most modern coal generation technologies available.

New high-efficiency, low-emissions plants are transforming energy generation across Asia.

A recent study by the International Energy Agency Clean Coal Centre found these plants accounted for 40 per cent of coal-fired generation capacity in East Asia, up from negligible levels a decade ago.

Another 1066 HELE power units are planned or under construction.

Already China’s embrace of these technologies has reduced its emissions by nearly half a billion tonnes of CO2 annually.

To put this in context, that’s ­between five and 10 times the ­annual emissions savings achieved by the much vaunted EU emissions trading scheme.

There are other ways Australia can help. With one-third of the world’s uranium reserves, Australia can also contribute to the expansion of India’s nuclear power sector, which New Delhi aims to account for 25 per cent of India’s energy needs by 2050.

Gas will also be a significant contributor. And we, along with other nations, should help to develop their renewable sector. But coal will provide the ballast for India and other nations’ energy needs.

As Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution for Science’s department of global ecology and a participant in the IPCC, told the Scientific American: “Right now, if I were Prime Minister Modi, I’d be saying, ‘Gee, I can deliver coal-based electricity way cheaper than I can deliver renewables.”

source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au