More Solar to Make Electricity Accessible by Everyone
The airport of Cochin, in the Indian state of Kerala, wanted to distinguish itself from the other airports in the Indian subcontinent. And it succeeded. Since August 2015, India's fourth airport by passenger traffic has gone carbon neutral, thanks to a photovoltaic plant of 12 MW (megawatts) built in 6 months with the aid of the German company Bosch. Thanks to an investment of nearly $10 million, the new energy plant is now connected to the electrical grid, as it's capable of producing an energy output in excess of what the airport needs, thus bringing to zero its demand for electricity generated by burning fossil fuels. This investment choice is part of an ambitious program of energy development called Solar, launched by the Indian government to cope with the rapid growth in domestic energy demand.
Overall, the Indian government has planned for the contribution solar energy to grow from the current level of 4 GW (1/5 of the photovoltaic power installed in Italy) to the target of 100 GW in 2022. An impressive investment program, but perfectly rational in the light of the need to bring electricity to hundreds of millions of people who still do not have it and, above all, of the new economics of photovoltaic energy, now competitive with traditional fossil sources in areas with strong sunlight.
The decision of the company managing the Indian airport suggests two considerations. First, there is consensus on the decarbonization of the energy system, even in an emerging economy, which we cannot define rich and is at the beginning of the electrification process. Secondly, there is a growing preference for the distributed model of energy generation with respect to the traditional centralized one, especially with respect to the possibility of involving local resources (labor, capital, knowledge) in power generation.
Similar decisions are being taken with increasing frequency in other countries, from China, which is smashing record after record in terms of installed capacity for wind and solar power, to the countries of North Africa, Chile and Brazil, which have committed major investment outlays to the development of renewable energy, even in the adverse economic conditions of recent years. Sun and wind are no longer the prerogatives of rich Western investors, championing the defense of the environment in the interest of the few, but investment opportunities that are being seized around the world by entrepreneurs new to the energy sector.
The case of Cochin is thus paradigmatic of the changed conditions for the development of electrical energy, where investment in relatively small power plants distributed across the land are being favored over large plants, which are the exclusive preserve of big investors, and are difficult to finance and make palatable to local populations. In other words, the big power stations have been felled by diseconomies of scale, which are not offset, as it was in the past, by the higher returns of mega-plants.
With the growth in energy demand being increasingly met by the growth in electricity supply from renewable sources, the target of containing emissions of greenhouse gases appears a bit more within reach. There is thus cause of hope for a binding climate agreement in the international negotiations currently undergoing at the UN COP21 conference in Paris.