Breaking News to start the Week
Monday Morning Blues, experienced by residents of Mumbai, almost literally. With the tripping of the
Grid in Palghar area a good part of the Maximum city woke up to a Working Monday without electricity.
With the world moving to Industry 4.0 and SMART grids; from Coal to Green; from Oil to Hydrogen, we
are still stuck up with legacy systems built on the principle of Large Power Plants serving millions of
customers.
And with one snap in that Big Power plant, millions go without energy. Despite paying through our noses
for our electricity bills or at gas stations, we continue to get second grade energy services, and that inspite
of all the efforts put in by the Government, Power producing and distribution companies. In the post
COVID-19 world life models and business models are undergoing a fundamental change, life post-2020 is
going to be different, and then why can’t our energy grids think different? Why can’t we have energy that
is 24×7 clean, green, reliable, and affordable?
Yes, the technologies on distributed generation have matured and the developed world already is
implementing strategies to defossilise the world and at the same time implement cost effective & SMART
mini / micro grids that can solve the problems of T&D losses and also over reliance on large centralized
power plants.
With severe inefficiencies in the current grid and the growing renewables providing intermittent power
we are headed to a permanent state of chaos despite having excess power at the point of generation. We
continue to put good money after bad and to find solutions that treat the symptoms and not the disease.
The solution is decentralized energy and distributed power generation. With Piped Natural Gas
connections coming to most homes in Mumbai and other big metro cities in India, the country can look at
installing 1kW – 5kW combined heat and power Fuel Cell power generators that can convert natural gas
/ biogas into electricity, heat and water at a very high efficiency of 52% – 60% and the heat can be used
for heating & cooling applications. This will not only save on electricity bills but will also save on harmful
green house gases & provide a stable and reliable power to every home, every office, every factory. To
make the solution even more effective and in-expensive, every housing society must be mandated to
setup a waste plant that will process their domestic waste and produce gas, which can then be used in a
Fuel Cell, thus making way for a circular economy and reducing dependence on imports.
India must leapfrog to the Hydrogen Economy and start with decarbonization of residential and
commercial spaces with Fuel Cells or Hybrid solutions using Fuel Cells, battery & Solar. Projects like these
have been implemented with great success in Japan & EU countries and are now being aggressively looked at in S. Korea, United States, UK and other developed nations. Over half a million homes are enjoying clean and uninterrupted power, why not the millions in India?
And for all naysayers who say that the cost of Fuel Cell or new technologies is very high, “The Price of
Light is less than the Cost of Darkness”
The Powers to be must focus on promoting #Atmanirbharta in Energy, unless we have #SwadeshiUrja we
can never realize the dream of #SwawalambiBharat
The Future is NOW; The Future is Fuel Cell; The Future is GreenHydrogen!