OorjaSvavalambi: 

Non-AI Summary: Bharat can achieve total energy self-sufficiency in her 600,000 villages by 2028, cities by 2029, industrial centers by 2030. It requires visionary government and dedicated, no-nonsense implementation. 

Under-Ambitious Wishlist: 

1) 100% replacement of cooking gas LPG or CNG (piped) with Compressed Biogas (CBG) by 2028.

2) Full rural energy independence.  “Grameen Oorja Svalambi” (?) by 2029. 

3) Home solar-Biogas hydrogen generation and fuel cells starting 2027, scaled-up nationwide by 2029.

4) Hydrogen-powered Indian-designed passenger-carrying planes /seaplanes connecting islands by 2031. 

Oorja Svalambi: Energy Independence

Narayanan Komerath

 When I entered the IIT as a teenager, Bharat was just recovering from the war that stopped the genocide in East Pakistan. The Arab-Israeli "Yom Kippur" war, 3 months later, where Bharat had no part, drove the price of crude oil from around $2/barrel to nearly $12/barrel. India depended on imported oil for nearly 90 percent of energy needs. Foreign exchange was practically zero, the nation was nearly broke. The burden fell most cruelly on the most vulnerable section of our population. Kerosene, diesel. Fertilizer. Food. 

With the naivette of a first-year undergraduate, I wondered why Bharat with such a long coastline of tidal energy, winds and so much sunshine, could not just switch over to a clean hydrogen economy. And that has stayed with me all my life. In 53 years, dependence on energy imports – and its effects on competitiveness, has driven the Indian Rupee from 6 per US dollar in 1978, to over 95 recently. Expressing that in USD takes too many decimal places. 

Around 2006, I saw a way to get into the Energy field. Beyond Earth, sunlight is about the only source of renewable energy, other than nuclear reactions. Thermo-electric, using heat of slow isotope decay, is what powers those Deep Space probes, where the Sun looks like a bright star, but those are tiny amounts of power. So most devices sent to Shoonya Akasham, Chanda Mama or Mangal, depend on solar power. These are individual power plants, not connected to a grid. Small. What I call “Micro Renewable Energy Systems”. Of course there are the massive Saturn V type expendable chemical rockets, but they are, well.. expendable. 

The "8th Continent Chamber of Commerce" founded at the Colorado School of Mines under NASA sponsorship circa 2004, gave me a Homework Assignment: Find the market for Space-Delivered Energy in Agriculture. Two Weeks. Since I knew nothing of either field, I was driving home from the airport with the radio on, late in the evening, like Archimedes with the clock ticking towards Doom, I head a talk by an author on NPR (National Public Radio). It was about how much energy was consumed in producing, processing and transporting the food that we had in the supermarkets. It was a true Eureka Moment. 

But when I submitted my homework they just came back with something far worse: Propose a DEVICE that exemplifies what you mean: We are presenting to a team of Venture Capital experts on the prospects for Space-Based power. And that is when my students including a High School Intern, whose expertise until then was to sketch me as I would look 30 yrs down the line using Morphing Software, discovered that a bicycle cost only $50 new at the WalMart. Eureka 2.  Our images of the Vertical Axis Bicycle Wind Turbine were an instant hit - brought Rave Reviews.  Good thing we did not take that and do an immediate Startup WhatsApp Video with VC Funds Startup Tranche #1:  It did not work then, technically, nor now, but at least I know why, now. 

But the idea of Micro Renewable Energy grew. In 2006 my friends pressed me to Submit a Paper and Go Make a Presentation at the WAVES Conference in Dallas, TX: World Association for Vedic Education and Studies. My credentials were not exactly Holy: They were those of an Attack Dog, mainly derived from an event where I had been Conscripted On Pain Of No More Invitations to Tea and Mango Slices at one of the finest homes in North Atlanta: I was "Opening Batsman" on a team that went to explain to a Distinguished Panel convened by the President of local Emory University, why the Community were outraged at their Distinguished Faculty's abysmal ignorance of an Elephant's anatomy. More on that elsewhere... but just so you know why I was ordered to Dallas. 

I said OK, but ONLY if I can present a technical paper to tell my employers what I was doing there. And thus was born a paper that I thought was outrageous at the time: all the Experts on the Bharat Rakshak Economics Forum (true patriots but sometimes a little too sure of their own textbooks) laughed at me. Everyone knew that any Power Plant must go for the BIGGEST size possible. The textbooks all said so.  

The idea that caused them stress was my claim that for Bharat, an Energy economy based on Distributed Micro architecture, made far more sense than the textbook prescription for a Power Plant: (Why? Capital costs were 3 to 4x in India what they were in Developed Nations. They just HAD more capital! Land was at an even tighter premium in Bharat. So was water. Regulations were messy. And.. a Business with perceived Deep Pockets was just such an irresistible target for the huge Anti-Development (some said Anti-National) interests whose political power came from ensuring that people remained perpetually Barefoot/Pregnant/Hungry so they could be goaded into political violent. No, I am not partisan, but look at the history of the Narmada Dam. The notoriously delayed thermal power plant (The Hon. PM ManMohan Singh Himself pointed the finger at those obstructing it). Good highways. The Vizhinjam Deep Sea Container Port.  Let's see that algorithm: 

1. Acquire a HUGE tract of land with plenty of fresh water  (where I live that is the most important part: many would get rich right there). 

2. Kick out all the people living or making a living there. Level or flood the place. 

3. Build a Fence/Wall around it and post No Trespassing Signs. 

4. Hire locals - say 20 of them - to form a good squad to back up the Security People. 

5. Have a Foundation Laying Ceremony

6. Arrange a MASSIVE loan, preferably from World Bank, mortgaging future generations for 100 years

7. Award major construction contracts within about 8 years (another opportunity to get rich quick)

8. Start the Agitations By Environmentalists (many would get rich from the foreign funding of that)

9. Hire lawyers and watch them get richer with 20 years of delays. 

10. Appoint a Blue Ribbon Commision With Top Retired Judges etc to Inquire Into Cost Overruns

11. .... 

In those 30 years, the sun would have shone, the wind blown, the rivers flowed, vegetation grown and died and rotted and emitted methane into the air.. and NOT A WATT OF POWER WOULD HAVE BEEN DELIVERED. Not a Watt-Second, let along GigaWatt Hour, would have been generated, other than Hot Air from politicians and Expert Analysts. 

Instead, we said Bharat should Start Small, with Micro Renewable Power Plants at people's homes. This was consistent with Ancient Vedic Wisdom (a requirement to get into that Holy Conference, or so I believed then).  We proposed small wind turbines, consistent with all I knew (and showed a pic of The Bicycle Wind Turbine). In those days Solar PV cost over $5 per Watt installed: today it is well below $1, a vast vast difference, a dream come true. 

Generate 400 Watt-hours a day (0.5KWH) for 30 years, that's about 5400 KWh. Have a million people do the same, that is 5400 GigaWatt Hours, or 5.4 TeraWatt Hours. The investment would come perhaps 50% from the users, 50% at most from Government, for the education, healthcare and small industry that this energy enabled. No World Bank debt slavery. 

A Micro Renewable Energy Systems Architecture. We realized right then that this could not be done with just Wind, or just Solar Photoelectric, or (then popular) Solar Thermal. I needed a combination, which is what went into the "Systems" word (someone tried arguing with me on that, which is when I realized that this "everything" idea was not sinking in, they were will immersed in the "Which is Best" loser habit. 

The paper was received extremely well. The audience, mostly vegetarians, had eaten all the tomatoes for breakfast and did not carry rotten eggs. They were very very generous. I was inspired. 

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When the sun does not shine, we need other sources. Another source is Methane from CO2 on Mars, the moons of Saturn or Jupiter - or in decaying vegetation in your backyard. BioGas. Purified biogas is 94% Methane, per an undergraduate project report on the ‘Net from Keralam.

In summer 2015, I was teaching a 10-day course at IIT Madras under the Global Initiative for Academic Networks (GIAN). On Micro Renewable Energy Systems. And there in the Bose Einstein Guest House dining hall (in my student days we used to bicycle past that and imagine the sheer Luxury inside, but it turned to be just simple, with good healthy food from the same cuisine served in the Hostels except on nicer plates. I found myself chatting with Professor Indumati Nambi. 

I learned about her work on BioMethanation. Generating methane from sewage. Not glamorous, but of life-and-death importance to Chennai and India. She told me how the floods caused wells in Chennai to become polluted with sewage from septic tanks, in densely populated communities. And how to convert sewage into energy and fertiliser. How much they had already done in new housing developments, where lights were biomethane-powered.

But they had run into massive opposition, as people had understandable hangups about using cooking gas that initially came from sewage. In Tamizh, “enna saar, inda gas ilenthu vantha sadam eppidi Kadavulaikku munnale vecchiduven??  (How can I place food cooked with this gas on front of The Deity?) Sacrilege!  

I have the answer for that. You know about all those glamorous astronauts floating around, now for months and years, on the International Space Station? Water costs over $24000 per LITER (no joke) at the prices that NASA was paying for launch into Low Earth Orbit on the Space Shuttle. FYI, the International Space Station's orbit is well above the Shuttle's LEO, so that cost that much more. So how did these astronauts get enough water to live for months? Most of it comes from recycled waste. And if that is good enough for astronauts to drink in the Heavens above, why not for us?  

My relatives set up a Constant Pressure Biogas system, manufactured in Thrissur,  in their yard that year. (Precise quote: "Hey now he is Serious, so let's go get this or he won't quit bothering us!") 

Remember “Gobar Gas”, the desperate move in the grim 1970s? Gas from cowdung. From pits dug in the yard, filled with compost, with a cement lid. It was not a success, because clearing out the used sludge (valuable fertilizer!) and rejuvenating the Plant, was tough work, most residents neglected that and the Plant output tapered off.  But today’s Indian BioGas generators are Constant Pressure. An above-ground 10 cubic meter round cylinder made of (recycled) plastic, with a plastic lid floating, but air-tight, on the contents. You put a weight on the lid and that adjusted the weight per unit area – or pressure. The lid went up or down as gas volume changed, at that pressure. You run a line from the lid to your burner. You can see an example of this, behind the most enthusiastic reader and unreserved endorser of my Book, wagging his tail (now long gone!). The green tub. On the book cover below. 

What most people used to the term “Gobar” (cowdung) Gas, do not realize, is that the gas comes from vegetables. You do need a Gobar charge at the start to generate enough bacteria and jump-start gas generation, but after that it is all vegetable gas. No smell either. Maybe another charge 3 years down the line and yes, the place will small for a day during the operations. 

So from my relatives’ experience I know that biogas from kitchen cuttings provides about 30 to 50% of the cooking gas needs of an average Indian family.

But as my dear aerospace alumna asked bluntly when she too read my book, why does a home with 4 people need kitchen cuttings to provide methane? Adding Biomethane from sewage may end the need for any other source of cooking gas at least. No LPG. Works in urban high-rises as well as stand-alone homes with grounds. 

Add solar power in the daytime and you are an Energy Exporter. A micro Saudi Arabia!  One home, one family at a time, scaleable to all of India.

Today I think that dream is very close, due to the work of people like Professor Indumati Nambi. 

Recently several things have happened. Once again, a war in the Middle East and “interesting” daily tweets and tariffs from far away, threaten Bharat’s energy security. This time Bharat is much stronger, with people who have skillfully dodged many threats, and sufficient financial reserves to heavily subsidize fuel costs. For now. Still the situation is dire, the Rupee is again under stress, all showing why it is time to break out of these chains. Yesterday bank conversion rate was 95.27 to the dollar.

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. 

5. Electric powered automobiles, scooters and autorickshas are catching on. 

6. There is a hydrogen filling station outside Nedumbassery Kochi International Airport near the Center of the Universe (where I live). CIAL is the world’s first International Airport powered entirely by solar PV – wise of them, given the realities of power continuity on the grid.  Many of us are curious what gets filled there.

The dream of quiet streets with clean air in Bharat’s cities, is not far off. Plus enough power to vacuum the dust off the streets every night. Imagine that. Now if one could have all “AI” managing traffic with automatic Whack-Paddles next to the ears of drivers… 

At the home level, so many households now have solar photovoltaic power. Most of them are on-grid but some like me have off-grid with batteries. Next step is to see if we can go to deep-cycle Lithium batteries, then generate hydrogen during peak sunlit hours, and run fuel cells at night or in the monsoon.

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 extremely unsteady: power is proportional to the cube of wind speed, so small changes in wind, which is always changing, cause huge fluctuations in power. The Europeans went in big on Wind Turbines, as in Bigger Is Better. Used up humongous amounts of concrete and steel to anchor 6MW or even 10MW turbines in the sea, with each blade bigger than the total wingspan of the world’s biggest aircraft. I learned that the blade-making was done by people who otherwise built big yachts – same technology. They were as finicky as airplanes, a tiny crack meant shut down. Low wind meant no power, but even a good stiff breeze meant shut down and lock up for safety. By then the power spikes required massive banks of inductors or capacitors to prevent burning the grid. All in all, not a success. The Germans tried taxing nuclear plants and others- taxes not only on profits, but punitive taxes for generating CO2, and for the Past Crimes of Industrial Pollution.. and for looking squint-eyed at bureaucrats. Still went broke. Last heard, they were thinking of taking down those BegaBehemoth wind turbines.

And.. as the old ladies in the US commercials for Cable TV said of home-sized home TV Dishes in the early 1990s (before today’s pizza-sized dishes), “But they’re SUCH an EYESORE to the ENTIRE Community!!”

I tried developing micro-scale Vertical Axis wind turbines, designed to survive the 130kph winter gales on North Vancouver Island where the Canadian First Nations Esquimalt Community lives, but gave up. Did get some good papers out of those, and the students went on to greater things. They can be used. By any rural or tribal community with PhDs in multiple engineering disciplines. Perhaps when biogas+ solar systems come up, we could add a wind turbine to add some free energy. After all the wind is still free.

There is another huge area of endeavor in turning waste into energy. BioMass. As I understand, this is taking scrap wood, vegetation etc and instead of burning it in the open, put it in a box without air and heat it until it decomposes (anaerobic decomposition). Extract gases, the molten sludge is then turned into Pellets to be used to burn efficiently. This is not a distributed micro endeavor, but more industrial scale. And therein has been its problem. In the 1990s, European experts concluded that even if they could get the raw material (scrap wood) to the door of the plant for free, they could not make this enterprise viable. An unofficial non-credit attendee in my GIAN course was a young lady doing her PhD, in the Sunderbans, trying to help the people with viable energy sources: the place floods every year, so established power grid was hard. I suggested residential solar PV, and she said, no, we tried that, but they said: “why is it that my cousin in Kolkotta can watch TV serials all night, but mine cuts out by 9PM? Unfair!” So I suggested biomass and she said, they tried that, but found themselves competing with the residents to pick up scraps to burn in the kitchen. Bharatiya Realities. 

But diehard optimists are reviving biomass as a source because there is so much of it every year, if only one can use it properly. And this is where a visionary government can make the connections with visionary entrepreneurs who also understand the local realities.

What about action Points to come out of this rant, per my new Rant-Harvesting Policy (RHP)? Recent experience shows that I usually UNDERSHOOT in ambition, what Bharat goes ahead and does, so this is more than possible.

 1) Target of full rural energy independence.  “Grameen Oorja Svalambi” (?) by 2029. Meaning decentralized, distributed, and not for heavy industry, but enabling sustainaibe, comfortable, post-modern lifestyles in our beautiful and serene villages.  

2) 100% replacement of cooking gas LPG or CNG (piped) with Compressed Biogas by 2028.

3) Home solar-Biogas hydrogen generation and fuel cells starting 2027, scaled-up nationwide by 2029. This requires significant attention to safety to make sure that the Hindenburg superstition does not return.

4) Hydrogen-powered Indian-designed passenger-carrying planes for intercity/interisland connectivity by 2031. Someone is already building a UAV seaplane to do the inter-island part.

The above are doable without any serious exertion by Government, beyond enlightened policy and IMPLEMENTATION.  Industry can take the nuclear/coal-thermal power GigaWatt power plants forward. In Kerala and the Himalaya hydro-electric already complements power, but not much, and dams at high altitudes pose significant risk beyond just agitations. In the coming Energy Surplus economy, the best argument for dams is the scenic boat-ride on the reservoir lake with ice-cream stalls.

Vande Mataram.