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Powering Change In India
In order to deliver on its ambitious plan to position India as a global economic powerhouse over the coming years, the Government of India needs to urgently develop its domestic energy network.
In a country that struggles to keep the lights on for more than 4 hours a day in many areas, delivering reliable, secure and environmentally friendly energy sources to power the future demands of industry and commerce is a huge challenge for the current Modi Administration.
To tackle this problem, India is seeking to deliver a range of energy options encompassing Solar, Wind, LNG, Oil and potentially further down the line, Nuclear.
Solar is presently the early ‘front runner’ to bring energy to the most energy-deprived areas, offering as it does the opportunity to deliver green energy quickly both locally and on a wider basis through feeding into India’s developing national grid network.
For the time being, India has dismissed the notion of investing heavily in relatively quick-to-deliver but heavily polluting Coal fired Power Stations, having seen the major pollution problems this has caused in China. In addition, whilst Oil prices are historically low at the time of writing, India is not a domestic producer and fears getting ‘caught out’ if it develops a power network that relies heavily on imported Oil with the attendant risks of restricted world supply and price-hikes. As such, whilst Oil will understandable stay ‘in the mix’, it will remain one of several options
Meanwhile, Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) is already being used to fuel certain Power Stations across India and with a major LNG supply deal with Russia now in place, we can expect to see more Powers Stations using this fuel in the future.
Wind energy is seen as an expensive alternative to Solar and as India gets far more Sun than wind, Wind energy may struggle to make inroads into this market. That is unless it is able to significantly reduce its costs, as the Government of India will certainly not subsidise it in the way that European Governments have in the past.
All things considered, India’s growing demand for energy offers tremendous opportunities to UK Developers and Service Providers operating in both the fossil fuel and green energy spaces.
Article supplied by Francis Consulting