I wanted to have a reasonable debate with you and other solar proponents, because I trust you are intelligent guys and deeply concerned about eradicating India’s poverty. So I expected you to answer the questions I have raised – that is on the land requirements of solar energy.

Please don’t panic, let’s reason together.

The art of politics is to use incomplete arguments to advance their motives, and Lovins does a very good job of it. So I said Mr. Amory Lovins is a political activist, and being a political activist is not bad.

As Britrihari says, a wise man is like a swan.. he separates the milk from water. This is how one should read political arguments.

Regarding “If you ponder over your above statement, the fallacy of it will become evident.”
your lie about my fallacy is the only thing thats evident here.

Notsure, why don’t you do some research and report back here?

If some one could have made money on it they would be doing so, rather than pushing for subsidies.

If you ponder over your above statement, the fallacy of it will become evident.

Yes, A is A because it is self-evident.

I wish it were true. Given that his ideas are mostly on the fringe so far and haven’t become mainstream, maybe he’s not as good as you make him out to be.

And nuclear reactors don’t hog water? Wonder why so many of them are located near a river then. Plus accidents like these carry their own risks to humans: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,566412,00.html

As for land, at least in the US, solar panels are approved after an environmental and land-impact review. But there’s plenty of land (e.g. along the highways) where solar panels can easily harvest energy without hogging land.

Oh, I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to.

You haven’t replied to the main issue I have raised, which is that solar energy hogs precarious resources such as water and land.

By your own argument, these negative externalities and socializing risks should be included in computing solar costs. Also, the opportunity costs of not using nuclear, which are continued dependence on fossil fuels or immense human misery – should be given their place in the antinuke arguments.

This is pure economics, and the same as natural capitalism or whatever.

I say Amory Lovins is a political activist, because he is indeed one, and a very good one at that. The art of politics is in spreading incomplete information, in which Mr. Lovins excels.

What part of Amory’s argument is, according to you, “political propaganda”? To me, his arguments make good sense and he is even pro-market, in what’s termed as natural capitalism (http://www.natcap.org/) – an idea whose time has come. Though why it was ignored by so many so-called famous economists is beyond me. Why show profits by excluding negative externalities and socializing risks, which seems to be the nuclear industry sop?

Currently we do not use electricity directly for a lot of our energy needs. Instead, we depend on chemical fuels such as petrol.

Also, India is not an industrialized economy yet, and the current energy usage is no indication of the future.

Please check this page for a comparative assessment of energy needs in an energy efficient future economy. I highly recommend the entire book of Prof Mackay.

A middle class family needs 25 KWH of energy per person per month (excl. AC and cooking). Even if you multily with a factor of four for industrial, transort and public usage, it will work out to 100 KWH per person per month or 3.3 KWH per person per day.

Current installed capacity itself is about 100,oooMW which works out to 72 KWH per person per month. Actual consumtion may be about 65% of this due to losses and inefficiencies.

AC, Water Heater and Fridge are the top three appliances that consume 70% evergy at modern homes.

While investing heavily on new renewable energy research, we must also spend equally on conservation.

Also we must tune our lifestyle for energy conservation and efficiency.

The quickest way to do this is to investing heavily in trains and light rail transport. We already have a good rail network in India, but this is in a great need of modernization.

Urban transit should be completely replaced by metro and light rail. Freight transit should be done almost completely by rail network.

For suburban and rural transit, oil vehicles should be rapidly replaced by electric and hybrid vehicles.

Converting to an electrified transport is a non-partisan issue. This electricity can be provided by either solar or nuclear. We have no disputes about this, so this should be done on a war footing.

A very good post on the economics of converting to rail transit.

We don’t need nuclear to replace oil. Simpler things such as natural gas, wind farms and even biofuels can do this job.

But to replace coal – the dirtiest fossil fuel (hopefully as early as within 25 years, even though India has 100 years worth of coal), we will need massive nuclear and solar electricity production.

Please try to diversify your sources of information. It is sad to see an intelligent guy like you get stuck in a political propaganda spun by the likes of Amory Lovins.

For a primer on sustainable energy, this book by Prof David Mackay is very good. For a reasonable lifestyle of an industrialized economy, each person needs about 135 KWH of energy per day.

Multiplied by India’s population, we need 135 TWH per day, that is a capacity of 3240 TW.

The energy density of solar is very low. Solar energy advocates should remember this simple fact : to produce any reasonable quotient of energy, their plans have to be country sized . For example, to produce India’s energy needs, an area equivalent of Madhya Pradesh will have to be covered up with solar panels and wind turbines.

Direct sunlight hitting at mid-day has about 1000 W/m^2. Accounting for daylight factor (1/4 of day = midday sun) and sunniness (1/3 of time is sunny), we get a figure of 80 W/m^2. The best technology for converting this to electricity (solar photovoltaic) is about 30% efficient. Current Solar PV has an energy density of 24 W/m^2. New advances of color dyes can make this about 50% efficient, that is an energy density of 40 W/m^2.

In practice, we will diversify our solar production to use sources like concentrated solar thermal, wind, tide and hydro-electric, which have even lesser energy densities than Solar PV.

Solar energy can indeed provide our required 3240 TW, but its demands on land and water will be very exacting. It will do massive environmental wreckage and murder our forests and biodiversity.

Frankly, India cannot go solar with its 1billion+ population. If we reduce our population to about 200 million, solar energy might be intelligently deployed to cater to all our needs. But until then, its costs will be environmentally (not to mention economically) too prohibitive.

This is why I think we should diversify our energy sources. Let’s say we get 40% of our energy needs from solar, hydel and wind. The rest of the 60% would come from breeder reactors using Thorium.

India has sufficient Thorium reserves to last for several thousands of years. We are already in an advanced state of deploying fast breeder reactors. Once the 3rd stage of our indigenous nuclear program commences, we will have no need for foreign fuel – either oil or nuclear.

Relying on Thorium for mid-term future thus saves a lot of environmental damage and preserves our biodiversity. At the same time, this industrializes our country and removes poverty.