With Only 2 Days Of Coal Left In India, A List Of Alternatives & Next Steps To Curb The Crisis

India is on the verge of mass power shortages, with the country's power plants running dangerously low on coal. Coal-fired power stations had an average of four days¡¯ worth of stock of the fuel at the end of last month, the lowest level in years, and down from 13 days at the start of August. More than half the plants are on alert for outages.

In a country where 70% of the electricity is generated using coal, this is a major cause for concern as it threatens to derail India's post-pandemic economic recovery. But why is this happening?

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Why is it happening?

This crisis has been in the making for months. As India's economy picked up after a deadly second wave of Covid-19, demand for power rose sharply. Power consumption in the last two months alone jumped by almost 17%, compared to the same period in 2019.

At the same time global coal prices increased by 40% and India's imports fell to a two-year low. The country is the world's second largest importer of coal despite being home to the fourth largest coal reserves in the world.

Power plants that usually rely on imports are now heavily dependent on Indian coal, adding further pressure to already stretched domestic supplies.

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What are the alternatives?

Solar power

Solar power has entered a new global era. The industry was long dependent on subsidies and regulatory promotions. Now, technological innovation and falling solar-panel prices have made solar power inexpensive enough to compete on its own with other fuel sources in some regions, when it comes to newly built plants.

That could turbocharge growth of renewables in the global energy industry, especially in fast-growing Asian markets where much of the world¡¯s energy infrastructure expansion will take place.

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Solar-plant development is going mainstream, with finance provided by global investors like Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund GIC and huge Western pension and private-equity funds.

So far, the renewable-energy push hasn¡¯t halted the growth of global energy emissions. But the success of countries like India in feeding their rising power demands with clean energy will still be key to blunting the growth of global challenges like pollution and climate change.

Solar¡¯s big problem: It generates power only when the sun shines.

Wind power

Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form of energy, such as using wind turbines to make electricity, wind mills for mechanical power, wind pumps for pumping water or drainage, or sails to propel ships.

At the end of 2009, worldwide nameplate capacity of wind-powered generators was 159.2 gigawatts (GW) and energy production was 340 terawatt hour (TWh), or about 2% of worldwide electricity usage.

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However, similar to solar, wind power works only with wind. So displacing fossil fuels could require cheaper ways to store energy. And the more renewables in the power-transmission grid, the more the grid will need to be rebuilt to accommodate those special characteristics.

Natural gas

Natural gas is a major source of electricity generation through the use of gas turbines and steam turbines. Natural gas burns more cleanly than other fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, and produces less carbon dioxide per unit energy released.

For an equivalent amount of heat, burning natural gas produces about 30% less carbon dioxide than burning petroleum and about 45% less than burning coal.

However, the radiative forcing of methane - a potent greenhouse gas - is 72 times that of carbon dioxide averaged over 20 years (or 25 times that of carbon dioxide averaged over 100 years), and it is believed that using natural gas on a large scale will mean increased amounts of methane will leak into the atmosphere.

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The major difficulty in the use of natural gas is transportation and storage because of its low density. Natural gas pipelines are economical, but are impractical.

Nuclear power

Since it produces energy via nuclear fission rather than chemical burning, it generates baseload electricity with no output of carbon, the villainous element of global warming. Switching from coal to natural gas is a step toward decarbonizing, since burning natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of burning coal.

But switching from coal to nuclear power is radically decarbonizing, since nuclear power plants release greenhouse gases only from the ancillary use of fossil fuels during their construction, mining, fuel processing, maintenance, and decommissioning ¡ª about as much as solar power does, which is about 4 to 5 percent as much as a natural gas-fired power plant.

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Nuclear power plants operate at much higher capacity factors than renewable energy sources or fossil fuels. Capacity factor is a measure of what percentage of the time a power plant actually produces energy. It¡¯s a problem for all intermittent energy sources. The sun doesn¡¯t always shine, nor the wind always blow, nor water always fall through the turbines of a dam.

What options does the government have?

The question of how India can achieve a balance between meeting demand for electricity from its almost 1.4 billion people and the desire to cut its reliance on heavily polluting coal burning power plants has been a major challenge for the government in recent years.

The vast scale of the problem makes a short-term solution unlikely, according to Dr Nandi. "It's just the sheer scale of things. A huge chunk of our energy comes from thermal [coal]. I don't think we've reached that stage yet where we have an effective substitute for thermal. So yes, it's a wake-up call, but I don't think the centrality of coal in our energy needs is set to be to be replaced anytime soon, he said.

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Experts advocate a mix of coal and clean sources of energy as a possible long-term solution. "It's not completely possible to transition and it's never a good strategy to transition 100% to renewables without a backup. You only transition if you have that backup available because then you're exposing a lot of manufacturing to many risks associated with the environment", Jain said.

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