Hydro Power in India

The conference had an interesting panel on energy, naturally a key segment of infrastructure. I found it interesting that India already has a fairly high focus on hydro power, a renewable resource. In fact, India's current power breakdown is 54% coal, 25% hydro, 10% natural gas, and 10% for others including solar, wind, and nuclear. To put it into perspective with other countries, the US only generates 8% of its energy from hydro, while China gets 23% and Paraguay gets 100%. While today's hydro power output is 36 GW (of a total power output of 143 GW), India has potential to generate 149 GW from hydro power, and the government has made it a priority on the eleventh and twelvth five-year plan to generate 40% of India's power output from hydro sources.

Also, while climate change is on the radar as the country thinks about renewable energies, the secretary of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy clearly stated that their focus is on India's energy security with climate change being an incidental benefit. Very sensible to me, with the way oil economy and prices are going, but fortunately hydro power addresses both issues. I feel that one inherent risk with hydro though is seasonality particularly that during times of drought the power source could shut down; as with any country, it's prudent to invest in more than one renewable energy source to prevent power outages due to natural phenomena. To this, it was mentioned that other forms are being looked into, particularly biomass (where the focus is currently on funding small plants and entrepreneurs), wind turbines (where Suzlon is already a market leader), and solar.

Finally, the other major issue with hydro power that relies on dams is the land requirement and the effect of developing this land for infrastructure on its inhabitants. But I'll save my thoughts on that for another time, as the conference has a panel tomorrow on the very subject of land.