BackSolar is the way to go
Investment in solar energy is not an investment merely to enhance the GDP, but it is to save mankind from climate change and promote sustainable living
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Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink."―
S.T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
These lines can well apply to the lack of universal energy access in our times in the 21st century. The multiverse is made up of energy, for energy and by energy. Solar is the way to go, and we are late in the race!
In 1861, Augustin Mouchot, the French genius, received a patent for the Marmite Solaire, a burning mirror that focused on a heat-trapping glass jar. At the 1878 Paris Exhibition, Mouchot’s exhibition engine was weighty, with a mirror over 13 feet in diameter and a 21-gallon boiler. One sunny day out on the Trocadéro, Mouchot generated seven atmospheres of pressure in his boiler, set up an ice-maker, and produced a solar block of ice. Bystanders puzzled over the paradox of a running a furnace to create ice, and it so tickled the judges’ fancy that Mouchot was awarded a gold medal by the French government. More than 150 years later, we are still wasting so much of solar heat. The story is no different for solar lighting. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for whom transition from megawatt to gigawatt in solar energy is an article of faith, once said the heat in the sun’s rays is an antidote or medicine for the fatal disease of heat—global warming.
We are in exciting times on the frontier of technology. Could we get drinking water from humidity in the air through solar? Could we fill up entire coast lines in all countries with pumped storages and trade power to make a profit? Could 3-D printing of solar panels bring the cost further down? Could a breakthrough in storage technologies make grids and high tariffs irrelevant by bringing down the cost of storage in urban and remote homes and farms? Could we bring in the right policies and market instruments to harness solar energy so that the dream of universal energy access does not have to wait until 2030? Can we run the economy of a nation with 100% solar or a combination of renewables? Could we have a global and circular green grid where the sun never sets and the grid feeds the entire world—at least, until fusion at room temperature becomes a reality or the sun dies and fades away into cosmic dust and cloud? I strongly believe that the solar journey and the electrons that make up solar energy have a human and social face. Investment in solar is not an investment merely to enhance the gross domestic product growth, but it is to save mankind from climate catastrophes and promote sustainable living. The advocates of cost must put a dollar value on those positive externalities too. We can then transition from coal age and oil age to solar age.
The International Solar Alliance, jointly launched by India and France in the presence of the UN on 30 November 2015 in Paris, symbolises this dream of a whole mankind to complete the solar journey when every citizen in the world has affordable access to energy to realize his or her full potential in a free and sustainable world. I visited an island in the Sundarbans, off Kolkata, to see a mini grid and asked an islander: How have the solar street lights and home lights helped your family? The reply sums up what energy access means to the poor:“The street lights have brought down the rate of snake bites in the locality and incidence of theft, and children can now do their homework and hence do not avoid schools." The world economy can afford a billion home lighting systems that reduce costs and light up each dark home and equip it with a TV, a refrigerator, a fan and a few LED bulbs.That would then be: Light light everywhere, and not a single soul in the dark,
Bright bright everywhere, enough light to carry and park!
Upendra Tripathy is the interim director general of International Solar Alliance. The views expressed here are personal.
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