Delhi International Renewable Energy Conference 2010
EcoGeneration — January/February 2011
The Delhi International Renewable Energy Conference, held in Delhi from 27–29 October 2010, was the fourth International Renewable Energy policy development conference since 2004, attracting approximately 9,000 attendees over three days. Andrew Lang attended the conference.
The Delhi International Renewable Energy Conference (DIREC) was the fourth International Renewable Energy policy development conference since 2004, with previous ones being at Bonn, Beijing and Washington.
The conference was opened with speeches on renewable energy activity and targets in India by the Indian President and a number of federal Ministers.
The opening was attended by official delegations from over 40 countries, and delegates from over 70 countries. The following 3-day conference and expo attracted up to 9000 attendees over 3 days, had over 500 trade and government stands, and over 300 speakers. The final day saw development of policy material and resolutions for the UN Cancun meeting.
India’s energy growth
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India is experiencing rapid growth and has instituted ambitious energy and renewable energy targets. The nation is the world’s fifth largest user of electricity, even when the available electricity per head of population is only about 700 kWh (by comparison in China it is 1300 kWh per capita and in the USA about 15,000 kWh). Currently installed capacity is about 150 gigawatts (GW) and the targets are to achieve 200 GW capacity by 2012 and 300 GW by 2017.
Increasing renewables
Installed renewable energy capacity has increased by 400% since 2005 and is now about 17.5 GW, with a target of 85 GW by 2025. India has about 600,000 villages with about 40% of these not on the grid. India's energy development activity includes development of off-grid renewable energy systems to provide low emission affordable electricity to these, and reducing percentage of electricity produced from fossil fuels from the current 80% reliance to about 72% reliance by development of grid-connected bioenergy, small and large hydro, wind and solar electric systems.
Government investment
In 2008 about US$3.7 billion was invested in renewable energy projects, and the government has forecast that another US$21 billion needs to be spent to meet the targets by 2012. A significant amount of this increase in renewable energy capacity will be from wind and solar. 40% of India’s 48,500 MW of wind capacity is presently in the state of Tamil Nadu, and India is developing its own wind turbine manufacturing capacity.
Solar incident radiation in India is from 4-7 kWhr/day across most of the country. There is an ambitious solar PV plan, with targets by 2022 of installing 2000 MW of off-grid capacity for mini-grids in villages (members of the BushLight organisation based at Alice Springs were at the conference), plus up to 20,000 MW of solar thermal electric and solar PV technology. In addition up to 25,000 MW of electricity could be generated from the identified available surplus biomass, and the scope for biogas production is only partly developed. Already several states are putting biomass and cogen-produced electricity to the grid of the order of about 1000 MW.
Exhibitors
Many foreign companies see significant business opportunities in India, and many countries have undertaken an aid role to help India with its energy infrastructure modernisation. Among the expo stands, as well as a plethora of wind and solar systems, there were promotions of everything from education provision to finance, from carbon capture and storage technology to rock tunnelling, from harvesting kelp for bioenergy to hydrogen production from algae for fuel cells, from torrefication technology to
harnessing tidal power. Project feasibility, design and management services, certification, CDM and carbon credit sales were being offered by many American, east Asian and European countries.
Governments with strong representation included UK, USA, Japan, Norway, France, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Canada, Scotland and Wallonia (southern Belgium). Chinese industry and manufacturers were also heavily represented. Mostly these stands were promoting the various specialities of these countries or aspects of trade with India.
Andrew Lang is a board member of the World Bioenergy Association and attended and spoke at the DIREC 2010 conference. He is convenor of The Wood Energy Group.
Energy from biomass in India
India is treating very seriously the potential of the renewable energy sector. India is the world’s second largest sugar producer and most sugar refineries already produce heat from bagasse. The potential for surplus power from bagasse across about 550 mills is estimated at about 5,000 MW and larger sugar plants are being encouraged and helped to modernise their existing systems. Overall cogeneration across all processing industries is estimated to be able to provide up to 15 GW.
In 2010 renewable energy generating capacity was about 17.5 GW, with about 17.2 GW being grid-connected. Renewable energy in India has increased its share of electricity production (on a capacity basis) from about 2% in 2004/05 to about 10% in 2009. The break down of India’s current renewable electricity capacity is 69% from wind (12 GW), small hydro (under 25 MW) about 16%, biomass and cogeneration about 14%, with waste to energy about 1%. On a produced basis electricity from biomass is almost half the output from wind, and biomass is the major source of off-grid energy and overall the main source of renewable energy on a primary energy basis (the combination of electricity, heat and fuels).
The target is for India to expand renewable energy to 25 GW by 2012, with much of this increase coming from biomass. It is estimated that India has about 190 million tonnes of surplus biomass available – mainly agricultural residues including bagasse – which potentially could produce up to 25 GW-e. In addition there is potential for production of over 17,000 million m3 of biogas from village putrescible wastes – enough for about 10 million household biogas digestors.
There are already about 4 million household biogas plants of 1-6 m3 volume in Indian villages, mostly fed with cow dung. About 150,000 more are being installed every year. Larger city and industry biogas plants presently feed up to 550 MW of electricity into the grid. The estimate of generation capacity from biogas from putrescible wastes (including sewage) across India by 2017 is up to 4.5 GW.
While wind and solar represent 80% of the renewable energy planning aim of 74 GW installed capacity by 2022, baseload bioenergy (including production of transport fuels and biogas) is recognised as having a very significant role to play.
In India up to 400 million of the population of 1.1 billion do not have access to electricity and many of these live in the 200,000 villages not presently within the grid system. Under guidance of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) work has begun installing mini-grids to supply these. A number of research organisations and several corporations are producing small biomass gasifiers and producer gas fuelled motor/gensets to produce electricity from the available fine and woody biomass.
One example of these small gasifiers at the DIREC expo was a batch type Ankur 11 kW model. This runs for up to 10 hours on a 300 kg charge of small chunks – in this case, lantana stem. It draws about 1 kW for itself and exports about 10 kW - enough for 70 houses with 2 light bulbs each on a village mini-grid. The price in India of this system including all filters, genset and cutting system for small diameter wood was 800,000 rupees (about $20,000) at the factory. The government has a plan to install up to 10,000 of such gasifiers to power village mini-grids over the coming ten years, and in addition by 2012 to have two hundred 2 MW gasifiers feeding electricity into the fringes of the national grid.
For information, including on Renewable Energy conferences in India over 2011, visit the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy website www.mnre.gov.in
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