Decarbonisation has entered the vocabulary of most governments and substantial corporates. Other than a couple of naysayers who are for the present holding their voice, they have all committed to a time-bound ‘net zero’ carbon emissions target. They are also in agreement more than what wants to be accomplished to attain that target. Fossil fuels will have to be steadily but inexorably replaced by clean power electrical energy must be increasingly generated from solar and wind transport must switch from internal combustion engines to electric autos power demand must be conserved and more effectively consumed and technologies and innovation will have to stay the centrepiece of all activities.
Unfortunately, it is not sufficient to basically set a time deadline and agree on the actions to be taken. Governments and corporates have also to agree on removing the legacy obstacles that lie on the pathway. Three, in distinct, could considerably slow the pace of progress. These are poorly made arranging systems siloed and fragmented physical and regulatory oversight mechanisms for the power ecosystem and lack of sufficient investments in power infrastructure.
Two events of the final month will clarify greater the causes for this concern.
On February 9, a chunk of the mountain Nanda Devi broke off and triggered flash floods downstream, which then washed away or broken a number of hydroelectric dams and led to the loss of hundreds of lives. A couple of days later, on February 13, a serious cold snap crashed the electrical energy grid program in Texas, plunging a wide swathe of the state into darkness. These two events have been unrelated, other than possibly the hyperlink of climate transform, but on examination of the causes for the consequential material and human misery, they provided typical insights.
First, in each situations, the authorities have been caught unprepared. This is in spite of the truth that there had been precedents—the comparably serious cold waves of 1989 and 2011 in the US and the Kedarnath floods in 2013 in India. The planners had incorporated emergency response procedures for cold waves and floods, but they had not anticipated such extremes of climate circumstances. Thus, for instance, Texan authorities had a worst-case arranging situation constructed about the assumption of a 15GW drop in creating capacity (of the total evening-time capacity of 70GW). But what they sooner or later lost was 30GW.
One cause for this lack of preparedness could be the presumption, based on historical information, that such sharp shifts in all-natural circumstances are infrequent—once in a number of decades—and that consequently the creation of safeguards against them is not expected and may well in truth invite the charge of gold-plating. Whatever the cause, the lesson is that while the previous is a valuable guidepost, it is an imperfect one specially in view of the spate of all-natural disasters across the planet in current occasions and that planners must be cautious about linear extrapolations. Certainly, for these contemplating the journey of decarbonisation, there is tiny of the distant previous for them to hang onto.
Second, the events highlighted the expenses of managing the power worth chain by way of a fragmented institutional and regulatory structure. The drop in temperatures in Texas froze the gas wells and the pipelines upstream, which then cascaded to knock out the water program and energy generation capacity downstream. There was no umbrella authority with duty for the whole program. Further, to compound matters, the Texas electrical energy program was standalone and unconnected to the other states. It could not consequently draw on the surplus energy readily available elsewhere to mitigate their shortfall. The tragedy in Uttarakhand also reflected the expenses of institutional fragmentation and lack of coordination in selection-creating. The ideas created in the aftermath of the Kedarnath floods regards land use and watershed management and the finest implies of securing an optimal balance involving building and the Himalayan ecology had not, for instance, been implemented in substantial component simply because power is a Concurrent topic and there is no one ministerial or regulatory body accountable for this domain. Further, these suggestions expected the coming collectively of a variety of non-power ministries, which, provided the existing vertically-siloed structures of duty and accountability in our program, did not come about. The glacial burst may well have been beyond anyone’s handle, but the consequential downstream harm was largely avoidable.
Third, these two events have raised queries about the reliability of renewables as a supply of electrical energy in occasions of emergency. The queries do not doubt the robustness of ‘clean energy’ technologies, and nor about the competitiveness of solar or wind energy. But they do reflect a weakening of customer self-confidence in non-fossil fuels. After all, while the gas delivery program collapsed, the wind did not cease blowing, nor did the sun cease shining. The queries concentrate focus on the power infrastructure. One cause why solar and wind did not choose up the energy slack in Texas was simply because the grid was not resilient sufficient to absorb the surge in the flow of intermittent renewable electrons. A related dilemma faces India.
Its transmission program is also not capable of managing the power transition. This dilemma will clearly have to be addressed if decarbonisation is to proceed smoothly. But to do so numerous challenges will have to be resolved. Not the least, how a lot will it expense to upgrade the infrastructure? How will it be financed? Who will take the lead on driving this transform, and so forth? Questions these are a lot easier to set out than answer.
Decarbonisation has come to be the buzzword. To guarantee it does not stay just that but translates into productive action on the ground, policymakers will have to develop structures that reflect the woven, multidimensional, interdependent and interconnected nature of the power ecosystem. This implies developing mechanisms that facilitate inter-ministerial and inter-state collaboration inside the nation, and multilateral cooperation internationally. Perhaps our Prime Minister must contemplate the appointment of a ‘decarbonisation Czar’, and provided that he was the progenitor of the International Solar Alliance, recommend the establishment of a multilateral forum of governments, corporates, economic institutions and civic society below the umbrella ‘Alliance for a Carbon Net Zero World’.
The author is chairman, Centre for Social and Economic Progress