Welcome to the concept of Micro Renewable Energy Systems. We claim:
The idea that Micro Renewable Energy Systems are especially suited to Bharat
Dependence on imported energy is a huge risk to Bharat.
Unlike the past, we are very close and must drive the remaining distance fast.
Top-down, huge projects have a history of poor implementation, delay and cost overruns.
Bharat’s strength is in her people. An approach that welcomes citizens as partners is the key to success.
Solar-Biogas technology, integrates well with green hydrogen, groundwater cleanup and fertilizer abundance: a Comprehensive solution must be pursued rather than piece-meal cut-throat practices of the past.
Energy self-sufficiency must build outward from the villages to the towns.
This has already been demonstrated: the lessons must be exploited with confidence.
But what are the hurdles? The realities of the marketplace, and those of implementation in a crowded land?
"Deja vu All Over Again?"
The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 -in which India had no part - ended with the price of petroleum going from around $2 per barrel to over $11. India was coming off a decade with 3 wars, famines and natural disasters, there was little reserves of foreign exchange, no subsidies. The most vulnerable part of the population bore the cruellest brunt as kerosene used for fuel and lighting in much of India, diesel for transport, and fertilizer, and food all shot up in cost.
India is blessed with a long coastline with regular tides, winds, and abundant sunshine, besides good reserves of coal. The need to switch to Renewable Energy was obvious then.
In the next 50 years, the stranglehold of energy imports has driven the Indian Rupee from 6 per US dollar in 1978, to over 95 in 2026 – with the dollar itself sliding by perhaps 75%. This is energy slavery.
Today, yet again, Bharat faces 90% oil imports at over $100 per barrel. But we see that the dream of energy self-sufficiency is close enough to reach out and touch. It just needs dedicated implementation and leadership.
Long Inaction, Swift Advances
One bitter realization is that we, as a country, don't move from our seats until we are backed into a corner with no choice left. That we are energy deficient is not some hidden secret; anyone with a working brain has known this for decades. Successive governments appear to have ignored the Anaconda in the room, and done little. Consider some numbers: We took on oil bonds just to artificially cap the price of petrol and diesel, and it took this government roughly eleven years to finish paying that debt off — ₹3.23 lakh crore, only closed out this past March, after two decades on the books. Today we are back at the 1973 number: Crude oil import dependence just crossed 90% again this year. Fifty years, and we've circled back to the same number. That's the part that should really scare people.
And that same pattern shows up everywhere you look. For the longest time, we did little to exploit our long coastline, strong wind corridors, sunlight almost year-round. Not that there are not examples of success.
But there is hope.
Even something as unglamorous as electrifying our train lines ended up saving close to 15,000 crore a year in diesel costs. That's real money, every single year, from something as boring as running wires over track. And there are moves across the spectrum.
The fast breeder program at Kalpakkam just hit its next stage — first criticality this April, decades after it broke ground. The promise of unlimited fuel, the thorium economy, where low-level nuclear waste becomes useful and unlimited fuel.
An actual hydrogen-fuelled train (fuel cells generating electricity) has started running in regular service, probably the first in the world. It has already gone out of the news.
The PM Surya Ghar Yojana (solar home program) is putting solar panels on rooftops household by household, already past forty lakh ( 4 million) homes.
The National Green Hydrogen Mission is targeting 5 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2030, backed by 500 gigawatts of non-fossil capacity. Without context it becomes hard for us to understand this. Since 2014, India's energy use has grown by about 45%, but here's the twist — over half our power capacity now comes from clean sources, which we roughly doubled in half a decade!
Compare that to China: when their economy was the size ours is today, back around 2008, they were burning almost double the energy we use now, and clean power was less than one-tenth of their mix.
So we're growing an economy the same size China's was, on half the energy, with several times the clean share.
And quietly, at the village level, there's GOBARdhan — turning cattle dung and farm waste into biogas — which just crossed five hundred community plants running across the country.
There are incentives rolling out for battery technology too.
Unlike in the past, we're not betting everything on one basket anymore — it's a dozen different bets running in parallel, big and small. But the road is still very tricky. What are some of the pitfalls? Why haven't we been able to make the breakthroughs we actually need?
We are incorrigible optimists. We believe that India can become energy sufficient. But 2 instances that make us ponder, how to overcome the hurdles:
1. Domestic waste management in the city of TVM
Deputy Collector and District Magistrate Tiruvanantapuram, also administrator/ Mayor of the city corporation. The big aim: acquired land in Kudapanakunnu fulfilling all legal and social requirements.
The plan was:
Segregation at source; from the bio-degradable manufacture methane gas and supply to households.
Non-biodegradable: paper, glass, cloth, metals, recycle.
Plastic: convert into pellets.
Problems arose even before the project started. .....
There were no built houses within 500 m radius, but constructions came up.
Even wells were dug, so complaints of leaching.
The poor supervision of the contractor-company and the project- time overrun,
Then came the court stays and Tvm city, the state capital today has no system for waste management. A neighbour in Ambalamukku says he caries it in a bag when he goes for his early morning walk to the Kanakakunnu palace grounds and chucks it across the wall behind the palace.
A Different Approach?
The economics and Plant Design textbooks all argue to build the biggest plant that one can. Select one place with plenty of water. Buy the land by hook or crook, cheat and drive out the poor people, build a fence, hire security guards with lathis and machine guns. Hire lawyers and buy off politicians to fight off the citizens.
Today we teach in System Design that 80% or more of the cost of a large engineering project, has nothing to do with engineering. It is all incurred in fighting the consequences of poor initial planning, and worse implementation - or deliberate sabotage. The list of examples is long: The Sardar Sarovar project. The Koodamkulam Power Station, are 2 glaring examples, where there is no doubt about deliberate foreign-funded obstruction.
Here I have a different way to suggest. The economics and Plant Design textbooks all argue to build the biggest plant that one can. Select one place with plenty of water. Buy the land by hook or crook, cheat and drive out the poor people, build a fence, hire security guards with lathis and machine guns. Hire lawyers and buy off politicians to fight off the citizens.
So is there an alternative for the Urban Trash problem?
We are actually working with a company doing something in the same space, just from a different angle. It's called Earthpharm, and what they do is take regular mixed trash — the stuff nobody even bothers to segregate — and turn it into fuel pellets. Solid Recovered Fuel, SRF, is the technical term. The numbers actually stack up. These pellets run around 4,200 to 4,700 kilocalories per kilogram — right up there with typical Indian coal, which is 4,000 to 5,000. But the ash content is a fraction of coal's — about 14% versus 30 to 50% for coal — and sulphur content is basically zero. So you get nearly the same heat, with a fraction of the pollution — that's where the "far less pollutant than coal" comes from, not a rough guess.
The best part, like with the Trivandrum example — this doesn't have to be one giant plant. It scales down to a 5 TPD unit or up to 25 TPD, tonnes per day. Take a district generating around 80,000 tonnes of waste a year — that's roughly Anantapur's number — a single 25 TPD plant there can chew through over 9,100 tonnes annually and produce about 4,500 tonnes of pellets.
And the economics genuinely work without anyone needing to fence off land or hire security with lathis — one 25 TPD plant costs around ₹5.7 crore to set up, brings in close to ₹4.56 crore a year in revenue, breaks even in under four years, and creates 30 to 40 direct and indirect local jobs.
Here's the part that makes this a real market, not a charity project — the government now mandates that cement plants blend in 5 to 7% SRF in place of coal. So the buyers already exist — cement majors, steel mills, anyone running a coal-fired boiler.
Our dream, honestly, is something like five of these 25 TPD plants in each of India's 700-plus districts. Andhra Pradesh could genuinely be the first state in the country to declare itself Zero-Landfill if it built this out statewide.
Take a district generating around 80,000 tonnes of waste a year — that's roughly Anantapur's number — a single 25 TPD plant there can chew through over 9,100 tonnes annually and produce about 4,500 tonnes of pellets.
And the economics genuinely work without anyone needing to fence off land or hire security with lathis — one 25 TPD plant costs around ₹5.7 crore to set up, brings in close to ₹4.56 crore a year in revenue, breaks even in under four years, and creates 30 to 40 direct and indirect local jobs.
And here's the part that makes this a real market, not a charity project — the government now mandates that cement plants blend in 5 to 7% SRF in place of coal. So the buyers already exist — cement majors, steel mills, anyone running a coal-fired boiler.
My dream, honestly, is something like five of these 25 TPD plants in each of India's 700-plus districts.
Andhra Pradesh could genuinely be the first state in the country to declare itself Zero-Landfill if it built this out statewide.
It turns the trash problem and the coal problem into the same solution.
What is described above has some special features. One is that the energy conversion is happening very near where the raw material - the trash - is collected, and the by-product of fertilizer can also be used in the locality. Collection and conversion at Point of Use. These are 2 essential features for a truly Bharatiya solution.
2. The Large Renewable Energy Plant
At a workshop on Land and the Local bodies in Chennai recently a case study was presented that i wish to mention as an illustration;
In a district in south TN a major solar power project was approved and constructed. Land was purchased by the private company from farmers thru agents. The elected local reps had no inkling. In one-to-one negotiation of this nature farmers most often are at a disadvantage.
In the examples cited above, they tried the same old scheme. Concentrate in one place. ACQUIRE the land, not co-use it. Smokestacks. Single-track, narrow-minded accounting of value. Why concentrate a Renwable (I assume Solar PV) plant in one place? The Sun shines everywhere, why lay high-capacity transmission lines from one concentrated location?
Why transport vast amounts of garbage to a central dump? Why not dispose at village or at least Panchayat level? As Shashank’s friends have demonstrated? Why not pay locals to participate and maintain? Why not subsidize based on the value of healthcare costs, environmental cleanup value? These require careful forward-looking accounting.
How much is it worth, to bring a clean playground to children today rather than 5 years from now? Teach clean habits at micro level? Teach water sampling?
NH: You can wake up someone asleep, but how do you wake up someone pretending to be asleep. I think Indian bureaucracy needs to be pulled up to stand and then assigned targets and be accountable if they fail to fulfil them. Without this India cannot become a super-economy or a developed nation. There is lethargy and the desire to NOT do anything, after all, they can and do get away with it. Then there is the insane and incredible extent of corruption. I can give a million examples, …
Beyond Earth, sunlight is about the only source of renewable energy, other than nuclear reactions.Sunlight IS Fusion power, remember! So most devices sent to Space, the Moon or Mars, depend on solar power. These are individual power plants, not connected to a grid. “Micro Renewable Energy Systems”.
When the sun does not shine, we need other sources. Missions to the distant planets use the tiny power available from ThermoElectric conversion, across the temperature difference between a nuclear isotope radiating, the deep cold of outer Space. Recently Indian scientists claim to have a breakthrough in the thermoelectrics area. Another source is Methane on the moons of Saturn or Jupiter - or in decaying vegetation in your backyard. BioGas. Purified biogas is 94% Methane. An Undergraduate Final Project report from Keralam, back around 2014, showed measurements. They also modified a motorcycle engine to use
So one has to get used to another change in thinking. There is no single super technology. Solar is not Better than biogas or Thermoelectric or hydro electric or mechanical. Incidentally, the Pioneer Villages set up by people who escaped Europe, drove away the natives, and set up these big geared bucket turbines driven by flowing water. Everything came through gears from there for textile making, everything. No need for electricity at all. You have to think in terms of integrated, collaborative systems, not cut-throat competition.
The Mars Rover for instance, is a Micro Renewable Energy system. A solar-powered Off-Road Vehicle, with a robotic arm, cellphone tower, chemistry lab, TV cameras.. All for the size of a coffee table. You can have one too.. If you have $4B and some pocket change.
And that of course is the problem. Achieving the economy of mass-market acceptance. America cannot do that: their power grid is too reliable for people to buy even a solar panel. Or inverters? What’s an inverter? India can and should: We have all had Inverters for ages because of the power cuts.
There is a completely different way to look at the economics of Energy, beyond just the Efficiency of Large Plants. In India land is scarce, capital is scarce and extremely expensive, and much of technology has to be imported - and can be obstructed. Where you can get big loans for 3% in the West, Indians pay 12%. Very hard to achieve breakeven with that.
But we have a lot of PEOPLE, and - they are not just numbers.
We are a lot smarter than government or industry give us credit for. We eat idlis, which are now recognized as “IQ Pills” after all!
The Paris Climate Accord and the Bharatiya Breakthrough
Briefly, let’s go back to 2012, the Paris Climate Accords. The Europeans had shifted the goal posts, and were screaming that China and India must be forced to cut down coal-based energy - mainly to reduce economic competitiveness. The USA had not signed the Climate Accords, but claimed to be well ahead of where the US would have been, as a Type A Developed Nation, in meeting obligations.
There was a 3-way deal between the USA, India and China. The US promised $10B to India - that was originally intended to buy American nuclear reactors, hooking India into a $100B or more commitment. Instead India spent that to subsidize solar panels for residential customers. The result was that the cost of solar power came down from over $5 per installed Watt, to under $1 today. Retail solar power has grown very fast in India. China benefited, as the source of much cheaper solar panels than what, say, the US might have sold to India.
Let’s look at what changed there. If India had instead spent the $10B to buy American nuclear reactors, perhaps 2 or 3 plants would have come up. And oh, by 2030 or 2035 India would be getting that nuclear power. With a lot of delays and strikes and lawsuits and Tariffs and Sanctions and chest-thumping as we see now. The sun would have shone all that time, but not a Watt of power would have come out. Not a child could have read by the light that came out. For a whole generation.
At first sight it is not as Efficient as the large plants, but.. When you look carefully, there is no contest. You don’t need new transmission lines. No transmission losses. No land purchases. 70% of the cost was paid by people. Taxpayers. Air conditioning became prevalent, productivity and standards of living improved.
What is the Net Present Value of enabling children to study? Of getting fans to blow away mosquitos? Of not having frequent Power Cuts?
How do you account for that in Textbook MacroEconomics?
This is the idea of Micro Renewable energy.
Since 2012, Indians have essentially eliminated the chronic power shortage in urban India - even as demand multiplied. Today where I live, the State Power company is trying to renege on the agreement to buy power in daytime.
I have an example to cite. Circa 2017, we got an NGO, the Swami Vivekananda Single Teacher Schools who used to run over 800 village schools in Tamil Nadu, to help us. Our engineer from Trissur and a People Person (Supreme HQ’s nephew) went to Chennai, bought the needed items, and took them to a village about 1 hour outside Chennai. Inside a day they had installed a 200Watt solar panel and some lights at the schoolhouse, so that the little kids could study in the late evening when the Teacher returned from her day job.
Now why did they need solar power? Niveditaji asked me this in 2018. This is Indian reality. That village was actually grid-connected. They had power lines coming in, they had light switches, light bulbs. But they got power only from midnight to 4AM (to irrigate fields). Not when the children needed to study.
Then we repeated that, with the engineer supplying instructions, but installation done by villagers who were trained with the first system. They installed # 2, 3, 4 an 5. Then we moved away, they wrote the proposal to US-based India Development and Relief Fund, and they used this geometric progression: installers trained from the villages. They built a total of 55 in a couple of months. Plus one biogas generator at a Teacher’s home.
We had proved the point: quite inexpensively, we could bring basic power to every one of India’s 598,000 villages in short order. At least to the ones who need such power.
But we stopped, because the next step was for villagers to realize that this power could be used to generate wealth. That is the hard part. I think Sreedhar Vembu was the one who really cracked this problem - rural-based high-tech enterprise, but that came much later.
Now why can this success not be repeated in other fields? What we proved is that Indian villagers are smart enough to handle the technology, learn to install and do basic maintenance. Solar PV. Home-level biogas generation. Biowaste fertilizer.
The next step is Green hydrogen - and pure oxygen. Stop dreaming of selling power to the power company - I knew that would never work. Instead, make sure you have a good use for all the power that you can generate, and store the energy. Hydrogen by electrolysis, or pumped water storage. Power for home-based businesses across the technology and traditional spectrum, such as 3D printing, vertical farming. Many rural areas can generate enough hydrogen and oxygen, to power their own energy needs through the night or rainy days. And cover their own transportation needs. They can pump their own water and not depend on gravity irrigation with 85% water loss. Break the fear of monsoon glitches.
Unfortunately as more capital became available and the foreign exchange crunch was slightly alleviated, India seems to have gone back to the same old Large Plant schemes and Import Catalog Shopping Spree. Complacency rules again, and that brings all the other baggage.
I could go on for hours on that, which is why I wrote a textbook in 2015. Now it has become obsolete. Things that I had to argue then, are {yawn} old hat today. I can declare partial victory, but now I sense total victory. Within reach.
Narayanan Komerath is an aerospace engineering professor who diversified from the depths of experimental research, to exploring Advanced Concepts, asking “How” not “Whether”, very large problems will be solved.
I, Nivedita Haran bring a lifetime of experience in the senior IAS cadres of India - and have seen the good and bad when well-meaning policy runs into implementation realities, bureaucratic red tape, crony capitalism and corrupt practices - and how to circumvent all these and succeed.
You’ll learn more about us as we go along. We share a common thread: all of us are diehard patriots (nationalists?) we want to see our country grow and the people prosper. And the issues we discuss will all be related to that.
Today we will look at different approaches to a burning issue. Energy Independence. Oorja Swavalambi
NH: Today I have questions. Like Prof N i am an incorrigible optimist. I believe; India can become energy sufficient. But 2 instances that have made me ponder, how do we overcome the hurdles:
1. Domestic waste mgt in the city of Tvp ; DC and DM Tvm also administrator/ Mayor of the city corporation. Big aim: acquired land in Kudapanakunnu fulfilling all legal and social requirements.
The plan was: segregation at source; from the bio-degradable manufacture methane gas and supply to households.
Non-biodegradable: paper, glass, cloth, metals, recycle.
Plastic: convert into pellets.
Problems arose even before the project started. .....
There were no built houses within 500 m radius, but constructions came up.
Even wells were dug, so complaints of leaching.
The poor supervision of the contractor-company and the project- time overrun,
Then came the court stays and Tvm city, the state capital today has no system for waste management. My neighbour in Ambalamukku says he caries it in a bag when he goes for his early morning walk to the Kanakakunnu palace grounds and chucks it across the wall behind the palace.
The second one i’ll talk about later
Narayanan:
Only the slide of the Rupee’s value is inexorable. It has gone from around 77 in 2022, to 95+ now. No one seems bothered! Some seem to think this is a good thing too.
So Shashank, what is your alternative and how did you get into this?
When the sun does not shine, we need other sources. Missions to the distant planets use the tiny power available from ThermoElectric conversion, across the temperature difference between a nuclear isotope radiating, the deep cold of outer Space. Recently Indian scientists claim to have a breakthrough in the thermoelectrics area. I have yet to check into that.
Another source is Methane on the moons of Saturn or Jupiter - or in decaying vegetation in your backyard. BioGas. Purified biogas is 94% Methane. Why do I know this? Because I downloaded an Undergraduate Final Project report from Keralam, back around 2014.
So one has to get used to another change in thinking. There is no single super technology. Solar is not Better than biogas or Thermoelectric or hydro electric or mechanical. Incidentally, the Pioneer Villages set up by people who escaped Europe, drove away the natives, and set up these big geared bucket turbines driven by flowing water. Everything came through gears from there for textile making, everything. No need for electricity at all. You have to think in terms of integrated, collaborative systems, not cut-throat competition.
The Mars Rover for instance, is a Micro Renewable Energy system. A solar-powered Off-Road Vehicle, with a robotic arm, cellphone tower, chemistry lab, TV cameras.. All for the size of a coffee table. You can have one too.. If you have $4B and some pocket change.
And that of course is the problem. Achieving the economy of mass-market acceptance. America cannot do that: their power grid is too reliable for people to buy even a solar panel. Or inverters? What’s an inverter? India can and should: We have all had Inverters for ages because of the power cuts.
That is another aspect.
Nivedita:
But Narayanan, the textbooks give clear reasons supporting large plants - they cannot all be wrong. Why do you think there is a different way?
I would like to chip in here Nivedhita ji. I think the real move is to separate two completely different use cases.
One is the power that industries, manufacturing, computing — basically whatever actually runs the economy — needs. For that, yes, mega plants are genuinely necessary; there's no getting around scale there.
But for ordinary people, day-to-day living, it doesn't have to be that way — it can be micro or medium-scale plants instead.
And this isn't some romantic modern notion — it's literally in the Arthashastra.
Bhagawan Chanakya has a whole section on the formation of villages, laying out how the king should settle and provision them so each one could largely stand on its own.
And it's not just Chanakya's word for it — A.S. Altekar, in his classic State and Government in Ancient India, makes the same point from the historian's side: the village, not the province or the crown, was the real primary unit of administration and economic life across most of India's history, with a fair amount of self-governing autonomy running underneath whatever empire happened to sit on top.
Two very different sources, two thousand years apart in how they were written down, landing on the same structural idea.
So I don't think we're inventing anything new by proposing this — we're just going back to a template this civilization already ran for centuries, and asking why we ever abandoned it. There'll be exceptions, sure, but I think this model is genuinely something worth falling in love with.
Now back to Professor…
NIVEDHITA JI.. YOU GIVE YOUR CLOSING STATEMENTS HERE AND WE WILL STOP HERE.
NH:
(Nk’s additions)
Narayanan: Recently several things have happened. One is that once again, a war in the Middle East has threatened Bharat’s energy security. But this time Bharat is a much stronger nation, with people who have skilfully dodged many threats, and with sufficient financial reserves to heavily subsidize fuel costs. Still the situation is dire, the Rupee is again under stress, all showing why it is time to break out of these chains.
On the other hand, look at the new developments. 1. Bharat has started running trains using hydrogen fuel cells. 2. Bharat is producing Green Hydrogen, meaning not from fossil fuels. 3. Nuclear reactors are coming up. 4. At retail level, buses have started running on hydrogen.
At the home level, so many households now have solar photovoltaic power. Most of them are on-grid but some people like me have off-grid with batteries. Next step is to see if we can generate hydrogen during peak sunlight hours, and run fuel cells at night. Problem there, as with the newer Lithium batterie, is not technical feasibility or cost. It is rigorous safety. But consider that people keep those cooking gas cylinders inside homes: it is possible to be safe and modern.
Electric powered automobiles and scooters and autorickshas are catching on.
The Govt. gave cooking gas cylinders to millions of households. Now they are handing out smaller transparent 10kg cylinders, and they are also investing in scaling up compressed BioGas. You can connect the dots - soon we can be using biogas for cooking, and end the dependence on imported LPG.
So are we getting there? Can we connect retail, home biogas, biomethane, into a grid?
Wind power, sadly, did not turn out to be very good. It is very unsteady: power is proportional to the cube of wind speed, so small changes in wind, which is always changing, cause huge fluctuations in power. I tried developing micro-scale wind turbines, but have now given up. Perhaps when biogas+ solar systems come up, we could add a wind turbine to add some free energy. .