A portfolio of renewables can supply India’s demand for electricity

The big energy challenge of the future will be supplying enough low-carbon power to meet the emerging economies’ growing demands.  Although renewable capacity continues to grow, as this blog has noted in the past, notwithstanding depressed financing, waning popular interest, disappearing subsidies, and slower technological progress, there is growing concern that renewables cannot be an important part of the supply solution.  A couple of recent papers have debunked this myth at least for India.

In a simple but rigorous and illuminating analysis, Professor S. P. Sukhatme shows that India’s annual demand for electricity in 2070 — when the country’s population is projected to be 1.7 billion — can be met to a large extent by a portfolio of renewable energy technologies, as shown in the figure below.  Further, this is a conservative estimate since contributions from a number of other renewables, e.g., geothermal, offshore wind, tidal, etc., have not been estimated.  Finally, the role of technology and innovation in improving both yield and economics have not been factored.  Even so, the traditional challenges with renewables, in particular intermittency, need to be overcome to ensure reliably supply.

Spurring natural gas demand with technology

Just within a few years of its founding, the ARPA-E has done an incredible job of identifying critical innovation gaps and funding a number of creative ideas with the potential of delivering disruptive breakthroughs. We can now add speed and timeliness to the organization’s credit.

The continued slump in natural gas prices underlines the commodity’s lousy demand outlook while supply from shale gas basins shows few signs of abating. There is, unfortunately, not much to be optimistic about growth for natural gas demand as one of our recent multi-client studies has explored in great depth. Advocacy around natural gas vehicles has attracted interest but meaningful penetration of natural gas in the transportation sector is limited by a number of technological hurdles. Natural gas storage and compression are two of many such hurdles.

ARPA-E recognized this issue and recently conducted a competition for innovative ideas. Last week, it announced nearly $30 million in funding to over a dozen winners ranging from large companies such as GE, Eaton, United Technologies, and Ford to contract research groups including SRI, REL, and OtherLab. Almost all projects focus on addressing gas compression and storage using a variety of ideas. These and several other technologies will be profiled in our on-going multi-client study on natural gas transportation.