For twelve years now, I have had a solely solar powered house; lights, fans, fridge, music system, popcorn maker, toaster, computer all work on solar energy.
Periodically, full-page advertisements blazing the pictures of the prime minister and a bevy of other worthies enliven our morning cup of tea proclaiming yet another inauguration or stone-laying ceremony. At least two recent ones have been the result of mega-million watt power plants being set up and my only response has been, "Shame. What a shame!" For twelve years now, I have had a solely solar powered house; lights, fans, fridge, music system, popcorn maker, toaster, computer all work on solar energy stored in a set of six batteries. The only major crisis has been when a post-monsoon hurricane blew the lid off the inverter soaking it and finishing it off.
An expensive mistake but not one due to the solar energy system itself. On the other hand, I am not at the mercy of the increasingly erratic and expensive power supply of the current electric company, and after the initial system setup, don't pay bills, or have to have my bills re-examined because they look fishy. Nor did I have to scan bills for unacceptable costs passed on to me by way of charges and levies and I rest fairly easy knowing the reliability of surya bhagwan in India that is Bharat.
So why aren't the powers that be whooping in delight at the potential of this amazing solution to our power woes and putting their moneys (or ours as the case actually is) in developing a village solar energy grid across the country instead of setting up mega-buck mega-problem mega polluting power plants ? Or worse, nuclear power plants?
"But solar energy is so expensive," I can hear you say. Yes it is, but only if you take a short term and individual view. It is no more expensive than the cost of electricity wasted in leakages or tapped illegally. Nor is it more expensive than the medical services and medicines needed for curing or tending to patients suffering from electricity - generation related diseases, no more expensive than the money needed to clean up they pollution caused by conventional electricity generation.
In this, as in most other fields, we have let the wrong factors affect our decisions, and trail behind other developing countries. In what could give us the rural infrastructural jump-start in today's context, urgent and drastic remedies to slowdown (Renewable energy) is all the more urgent, as more than two billion people one in every three persons worldwide, do not have such an elementary necessity of life as electric power.
Many of these men, women and children live in remote regions or island habitat where solar energy is their only recourse. The spin-off benefits of renewable energies are also of the greatest importance. Small and dispersed solar energy projects in rural areas including individual photo-voltaic plants and small hydro facilities, have a cardinal role to play in halting the increasing rush to the cities by peasants living in the poorest regions.
Such projects are also more 'democractic' tending to create new-cooperative structures that resist the concentration of power in a few authoritarian hands. And, in our context, the concentration of slush money in a few authoritarian pockets. But, perhaps there lies the true cause of its neglect in energy-starved India.
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