Renewable Energy and Sustainable Development

Kalipada Chatterjee

Development Alternatives organised a one day Roundtable on "Renewable Energy for Sustainable Development: Opportunities, Barriers & Solutions", on August 17, 2001 at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, as a part of the GEP-CCS project of the USAID, being implemented by The Louis Berger Group Inc. Development Alternatives is a major partner in this programme. The objective of the Roundtable was to identify opportunities, barriers and solutions for large-scale renewable energy development, keeping in view the environmental and social benefits of the renewable energy. The deliberations during the roundtable looked at technical, financing, policy barriers effecting the growth of this sector and possible solution to these.

Inaugural Session was marked by the welcome address of Dr. Ashok Khosla, President, Development Alternatives emphasizing that this roundtable should not be like several other business as usual meetings on renewable energy issues. He mentioned that it would be useful to discuss ‘what should be done’ by the Government, NGOs, Project Developers and other stakeholders to accelerate the promotion of renewable energy in India by removing barriers and finding cost effective solutions to the issues. He briefed about the framework of the Roundtable and said that the meeting would be successful if at the end of the day the participants identified a definite plan of action and have committed to work towards its follow-up.

He was followed by Mr. Ron Sissem, Chief of Party, The Louis Berger Group Inc. (LBG), who mentioned the GEP-CCS project, and its emphasis on energy as the key sector for GHG emission mitigation. The project is aimed at delivering information and technical assistance to diversify stakeholders’ activity for mitigation of GHG emission.

Mr. Richard Edwards, Director Energy Environment and Enterprise, USAID in his welcome remarks stressed on the benefits of the renewable energy to fulfill the energy requirements of the rural masses, its contribution in enterprise development & livelihood creation in rural areas and its contribution in GHG emission reductions and sustainable development of the country. He also discussed the fundamental issue facing the power sector and maintained that renewables being decentralized systems help in rural development.

Shri A. K. Mangotra, Jt. Secretary, MNES, in his inaugural address described the significant achievements in renewable energy sector in India. He emphasised on the efforts required to fulfill the gap between the planned renewable energy development (10% of the total grid energy) and current status (3% of the total grid energy). In India 80,000 villages are required to be electrified. He proposed that electrification in 18,000 villages that are not accessible should be done through renewable energy. He appreciated Development Alternatives’ role in providing an enabling environment towards promotion of renewable energy in India for sustainable development. He emphasised the need of capacity building among different stakeholders in renewable energy sector and a level playing field. He also talked about the developments in COP 6- II towards CDM and its impacts on renewable energy development.

The major thrust of the first session of the round table was basically on the Identification of Opportunities & Barriers - Stakeholders’ Experiences.

The objective of this session was to identify the opportunities and barriers facing the renewable energy sector. The session consisted of two activities – i) a series of presentations by the renewable practitioners and ii) a working group exercise to identify the opportunities and barriers. Dr. Khosla introduced the moderators Mr. S. Patara and Dr. Aditi Haldar, who ware to take care of the participatory process of identifying the issues and their solutions.

Dr. Ashok Khosla brought to the fore a few issues facing the renewable energy industry in order to set the stage for this session. He talked about the experience of DESI Power project towards commercialization of renewable energy. He stressed on commercial viability of the renewable energy technologies. According to him, the energy policies should have commitment for renewable energy development e.g. state electricity boards should provide for third party purchase of power generated.

He pointed out that nothing actually happened on ground till now despite government’s top priority in rural energy sector. He mentioned that various subsidies prevailing in energy sector at times result in decelerating renewable energy development.

Presentations by Mr. K. Sudhakar, Director, M/s R R Bioenergy Ltd., Mr. Subir Nathak, Managing Director, Market Dynamics Pvt. Ltd., and Mr. V. R. Vijaykumar, Director, Ravi Enteck Ltd, gave an idea of the kind of problems faced by renewable energy entrepreneurs.

Despite their pursuing innovative renewable energy projects, the entrepreneurs are facing problems due to factors like lack of capacity in the country to evaluate the innovations in the technology, lack of confidence among the domestic investors in accepting the innovations, constant devaluation of rupees etc.

The presentations emphasised on stable policies by SEBs to encourage more and more private participation. Reduction of import duty on technology and equipment is another need of the hour to make renewable energy viable.

Mr. Ajay Narayanan, Vice President, Infrastructure Development and Finance Company briefed about involvement of IDFC in the renewable energy field. He mentioned that India is one of the largest market for renewable energy applications viz. co-generation, solar, wind etc.

Some of the barriers highlighted by him are lack of co-ordination between the conventional rural electrification programmes and decentralised renewable energy development activities in an area, price distortions due to ignoring environmental and social costs while pricing the renewable energy projects, lesser private participation, lack of capacity in the rural areas and inaccessibility of fund to the small entrepreneurs is a major problem.

In the second part of this session, the participants were grouped among their respective categories as Project Developers, Financial Institutions, Govt. and Public Bodies, Non-governmental Organizations and International Development Agencies.

The groups identified the opportunities and barriers as faced by respective groups. The opportunities identified by the participants’ gives a positive signal in renewable energy development. The barriers faced by different stakeholders’ groups can be clubbed together broadly into following categories:

- Technological barriers

- Financial barriers

- Policy - Institutional and Social barriers

The second session of the roundtable focussed on recommendations for Promotion of Renewable Energy in India.

During this session, the participants organized themselves into working groups working on issues of technology, finance and policy (Institutional and Social)

The following issues emerged as ones requiring immediate attention:

1. A Comprehensive National Renewable Energy Policy

2. Availability of Data-base of Technologies with a Nodal Agency which is easily accessible

3. Full-cost Accounting including environmental & social costs

The participants discussed among themselves how these issues could be addressed. The actions required to address these issues and the agencies taking lead for these were identified as provided in the table below.

The Roundtable ended with the participants expressing their views about this meet and the need of a proactive contribution by the organisations & individuals who have committed to participate in different activities, within specific time frame, to realise promotion of renewable energy in India. q