How is India doing on the short list of climate actions that will work? Where can they do better?
Slide from Michael Barnard's presentation to India Smart Utility Week on The Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work
Much of this will be familiar to you, and much of it India is making good progress on. But it bears repeating in context the whole as Reji said, the first action is. My apologies for using United States’ Sankey diagram of energy flows. I looked at the Indian ones. The American one illustrates a primary aspect. The best of all the Sankey diagrams I’ve looked at for context, primary energy, solar, hydro, natural gas, coal, and petroleum comes in on the left hand side, electrical generation.
One unit of electricity for residential and commercial heat turns into three units of heat because we take two units of heat from the environment. The efficiency gains go up quite substantially. I did the work for the United States and I calculated if we pulled all the electrification levers, how much primary energy would we require? And it dropped by 50%.
The next step, of course, is overbuild renewable generation. But that’s quite a lot less overbuild in context of the overall solution than most realize. And I’m speaking to the utilities of India. You’ve undoubtedly read the reports on this and read the various analyses. I am, as I say, repeating some stuff that’s pretty obvious. But there is a context here that’s important. There is the historical legacy concept of baseload, which is more and more becoming obsolete.
Some of that work is building continent-scale grids and markets, spreading HVDC interconnects, especially broadly around the world. I like to say that high voltage direct current is a new pipeline. Slide from Michael Barnard’s presentation to India Smart Utility Week on The Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work
Now, China already has 19 gigawatts of pumped hydro in operation and 365 gigawatts under construction or planned for 2030. That’s an indicator. The United States, by comparison, has only ten older pumped hydro sites and only one under construction. So pumped hydro is a dominant way to firm electricity. Now, one of the things that people tend to say is that not every place is blessed with the right geography. Well, as we can see, India is. But secondarily, it’s a grid asset.
But when I say plant a lot of trees, I also mean return lands to grasslands where possible, restore wetlands, and restore coastal vegetation. Now, in India’s case, the mangroves of India were your natural treasure, and 40% of them are gone. Now, in the age of increased climate, extreme weather, and increased sea level rise, mangroves provide strong coastal benefits. They moderate the force of winds coming off the ocean. They moderate storm surge, they slow waves and reduce coastal erosion.
Now, India is already the biggest market for tractors in the world by a factor of five. But in some cases, that’s catching up with the rest of the world. Tractors still only work a fraction of India’s fields. But this drone is here for a reason. We’re now in an era where large-scale, heavy lift drones carrying up to 200 pounds of product can be seeding fields and spraying fields. It’s electrically powered.
Slide from Michael Barnard’s presentation to India Smart Utility Week on The Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work While 75% of steel requirements are likely to be able to be met by scrapping, that’s still 25% of new steel. That’s required both for quality requirements and for growth. Right now, blast furnaces are a major factor in India. But we have some alternatives. Already globally, 100 million tons of steel is manufactured from using direct reduction of iron using synthetic gasses. It’s a process which Midrex and other technologies use.
Next electrification of industrial heat. As Reji said, we have electrification technologies for every temperature of heat. We just need to apply them. This is a significant increase. India’s fuel excise tax is good, but it doesn’t cover industry or power. As we think through this, we start getting into the question about, well, what is a good carbon price? And the EU, the Economic Union, really does have the best carbon pricing structure on the planet that’s emerging. Canada’s is slightly better but lower priced. But EU is reducing the problems with it.
The next action is to proactively shut down the worst of coal and gas and oil plants. Now as we look at this chart which talks about some of the implications of burning coal and oil for energy on the left hand side of this graph, there is a real problem, which is that coal, while it provides electricity, kills a lot more people due to accidents and air pollution. My statistics say that every coal plant kills about 80 people a year.
We’re seeing this in the United States and China today, China uses its coal the way the United States uses its natural gas. Both of them are under 50% capacity factors annually. They are not baseload generation. The merit order says use them last. There’s a strong downward curve for the capacity factors of their generation assets, but yet they also must be preserved for strategic reserves, for electricity as you build out your storage and transmission.
Slide from Michael Barnard’s presentation to India Smart Utility Week on The Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work But this is a place where India is lagging when it could be leading. As we look at the global statistics, there’s the Project Drawdown. The Project Drawdown project did a ranking by business case. What is the cheapest way to have the highest environmental impact? And reducing HFCs was the cheapest thing that could be done. So this is a place I would urge India to spend more time and effort reducing its HFCs. So those are the things which we should do.
Now, for a decade, I’ve been looking at the natural experiment playing out in China. In the late 1990s, they established a nuclear program. In the mid two-thousands, they established a wind and solar program, and so I’ve been looking at those since 2014, and I’ve been recording data since 2010 about how much actual generation they’ve been putting in of those two technologies. Their nuclear program peaked in 2016 and 2018. That was when they added the most capacity.
Slide from Michael Barnard’s presentation to India Smart Utility Week on The Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work Slide from Michael Barnard’s presentation to India Smart Utility Week on The Short List of Climate Actions That Will WorkThis is a graphic I created years ago. We have about 3000 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. About 1000 billions of tons of that have been added by us since the start of the industrial revolution, and we’re still adding 35 to 41 billion tons annually. There’s an invisible dot down there.
Imagine, if you will, a huge beach of black sand. In that beach, there are 420 gray grains of sand. Every day someone is throwing another grain into the sand. Your job is to find those 420 grains and remove a third of them. That’s what carbon direct air capture is like. It’s just not effective. One of the leading companies in that place, is Carbon Engineering, now owned by Occidental, the major oil company.
Slide from Michael Barnard’s presentation to India Smart Utility Week on The Short List of Climate Actions That Will WorkReally interesting talk. And of course, the wedges, they’re well known, as they’re called, or portfolio approach in the power sector, that you need a lot of things.
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