Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper by Robert Bryce

Author:Robert Bryce
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781610392068
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2014-06-20T00:10:07.250588+00:00

India Is Not Going “Beyond Coal”

In July 2012, blackouts hit northern India, leaving more than 600 million people—about twice the population of the United States—without electricity. Trains were stranded, traffic snarled, and the country’s economy ground to a halt. The blackouts were caused by excess demand when some regions of the country began taking more power than they had been allotted.13 In the months since the blackout, one thing has become certain: India won’t be going “beyond coal” anytime soon.

At the same time that the Sierra Club pushes its “beyond coal” campaign in the United States, developing countries are rapidly increasing their coal consumption. Much of that surge in coal use occurred in India, the world’s third-largest coal consumer (behind only China and the United States). Burgeoning coal use helps explain why India’s carbon dioxide emissions jumped by 81 percent between 2002 and 2012. That same coal use explains why global carbon dioxide emissions continue to soar.14

Although India’s coal use—which doubled between 2002 and 2012 to some 6 million barrels of oil equivalent per day—keeps rising, the country remains chronically short of electricity. India’s per-capita electricity consumption is about 700 kilowatt-hours per year.15 For comparison, the average resident of China uses almost five times as much electricity as the average Indian, while the average American uses about 19 times as much.16 In mid-2013, Victor Mallet of the Financial Times reported on India’s electricity shortages: “Of all the problems blamed for the slowdown [of economic activity] over the past two years . . . the electricity shortage is now regarded by government and business alike as among the most serious.” Mallet went on to quote a government official who said that the country’s leaders used to think roads were the key to growth. But now, said the official, “it’s power, power, power.” To alleviate the shortages, India is planning to add about 90,000 megawatts of new generation capacity by 2018.17

While India wants to increase the amount of its natural gas–generation and nuclear-generation capacity, it still relies on coal for about two-thirds of its electricity production.18 With 60 billion tons of domestic coal reserves—enough to last a century at current rates of extraction—India has plenty of the carbon-heavy fuel. But the country’s mines are notoriously inefficient, and coal deliveries have been hamstrung by poor-quality transportation and ham-handed government policies. The result: India, which now imports about 25 percent of its coal, may soon surpass China as the world’s biggest coal importer.19

For years, Indian leaders have been saying that they will not let concerns about carbon dioxide impede their push to generate more electricity. In 2009, shortly before the big climate-change meeting in Copenhagen, that very message was delivered by none other than Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian academic who chairs the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Can you imagine 400 million people who do not have a lightbulb in their homes?” he asked. “You cannot, in a democracy, ignore some of these realities and as it happens with the resources of coal that India has, we really don’t have any choice but to use coal.

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