Feel-good stories often suppress unpleasant realities. If one were to look for something good in Commonwealth Games even at this stage, it’s the 34 apartments in the games village that will be partly lit with solar power. Now that is something to rejoice. Add to this the fact that a big company like Punj Lloyd is in the forefront of not only this but many other such projects.
In Amritsar, the Golden Temple will be partly lit with 18-kw solar energy. This is under an initiative of the Punjab Energy Development Agency (PEDA), which has allotted five solar power projects to Punj Lloyd, including a 20-kw project to power the Punjab Assembly and a 45-kw project for Punjab Raj Bhawan. This is under the special area demonstration programme of the Union Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, which provides a minimum incentive of Rs 2.5 lakh per solar energy project.
In Bihar, the public health engineering department has given Punj Lloyd the contract for 850 solar-powered water treatment plants. The aim of the Rs 232-crore project is to remove arsenic and fluoride from water in 28 districts.
More tenders are afloat in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and the North East, all triggered by the National Solar Mission’s subsidy for grid-based projects.
But the devil is in the details, as they say.
Take Karnataka. It is setting up a 3-Mw plant. It will be connected to a 1,000-Mw grid. A drop in the ocean. Now, look at the land required. Selco Solar India, which does decentralised off-grid projects in rural Karnataka, says five acres are needed for a one-Mw solar plant.
So, for 20,000 Mw, the land required is huge. If 15 acres was acquired in Kolar for the grid-based plant, the power goes to the neighbouring districts of Belgaum and Dharwad and meets just a small part of their needs. The people of Kolar who gave up their land get nothing.
If one were to look at the priorities of the mission, it is aiming for 200-Mw off-grid plants and 1,000-Mw grid-based power by 2017. So, decentralised off-grid plants are low priority.
There is also no emphasis on who maintains the plants. Ask Punj Lloyd. Tariq Alam, CEO of Punj Lloyd Delta Renewables, a subsidiary of Punj Lloyd, says maintenance is part of the package. He has no programme yet for developing local manpower who can run these plants when the company is gone.
When Shell Solar wound up, it left hundreds of installations orphaned. In Sri Lanka, close to 200,000 systems installed by Shell Solar can’t be used for want of repair. A financial company which funded beneficiaries is not getting its money back due to this maintenance gap.
There is no word on maintenance and repair. Whether it is solar power or mining, it is sustainable only if it benefits the community, which smaller off-grid solutions do. Besides, to be sustainable, it has to address the maintenance issue.
