Vendors at the Chennai expo on renewable energy organised by the Tamil Nadu Energy Development Agency (TEDA) quoted between Rs.1.6 lakh and Rs.1.8 lakh, for putting up a 1 KW (kilowatt) domestic rooftop solar power system.

The handing out of the Central Government subsidy has not yet been streamlined. “Several solar power vendors have closed operations over the past year because of losses suffered in not getting the Central government subsidy’’, says K.E.Ragunaathan, solar energy entrepreneurs who started Solkar’s in 1984.

At times poor battery packs are being sold because battery prices have shot up over the past year even though solar photovoltaic panel costs have come down.

Says Mr Ragunaathan “State government levies a VAT (value-added tax) component of 5 per cent on solar power components. Where is the incentive for the consumer to opt for solar inverter, if the regular electric inverter is also taxed at five per cent ? If the tax component is cut or waived, it would bring down the entry price for solar.”

Kerala had last year targeted to move 10,000 households to solar power, with each household accounting for a 1 KW rooftop power system. They reduced the VAT on solar power to one per cent.

Source: ‘The Price goes through the roof’, The Hindu write-up by Karthik Subramaniam

The Hindu devoted an entire page of  its Sunday edition to solar power, carrying articles that cover nearly every thing  one needs to know to go solar.

It is not as if awareness is lacking. People do see the advantages. And yet most of us remain solar skeptics. Despite govt.  incentives we don’t see a whole lot of people showing enthusiasm for  small rooftop solar plants .  State government offers a generation-based incentive of Rs. 2 a unit. plus Rs.20,000 subsidy, for plants of up to 1 kW. But the rules are still being formulated.

A one-kilowatt peak (KWp) solar photovoltaic plant, without battery, costs Rs. 1 lakh. With the capital subsidy of 30 per cent from the Centre and Rs. 20,000 from the State government , the initial investment will be Rs. 50,000.  Add a battery – costing Rs.50,000 – the cost of solar power to households would be Rs.1 lakh per kw.  Assuming that the plant generates 135 units a month, consumer saves, annually, Rs. 9,315 on power bill. A decentralised solar system should make economic sense,  at least for those who consume more than 500 units in two months.

We publish here some other info gleaned from The Hindu’s solar page.  For those wanting to read all the articles, we give the links at the end of this post.

We treat solar energy merely an alternative energy source, rather that the key to boosting power generation.”Actively promote solar energy as a viable alternative in urban India and not just as a solution to power-deprived rural or remote regions,” says Tata Solar CEO Ajay K. Goel.

SPO (solar purchase obligation) in Tamil Ndu makes it mandatory for certain classes of electricity consumers to get a part of their consumption from solar plants. SPO has been challenged in the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity by the Tamil Nadu Spinning Mills Association.

For large industries, it makes business sense to put up their own rooftop or ground-mounted plants than to buy solar power to meet their SPO. Daimler plant near Chennai has set up a 300-kilowatt (kW) rooftop plant.

Colleges/schools can do the same. B.S. Abdur Rahman University,keen on starting solar courses. is putting up a 150-kW plant. A.M. Jain College in Chennai is working on installing a 1-MW rooftop project.

Over 75 per cent of our solar projects use imported thin-film technology.Thin-films account for less than 15 per cent of the total solar installations worldwide.Thin-films have their specific application, but in India the choice was made not for technological, but financial, reasons.

Small rooftop plants on individual houses are slow in coming. Despite govt. sweetners. Besides generation-based incentive, of Rs. 2 a unit, the state govt. offers Rs. 20,000 subsidy for units with capacities up to 1 kW. But the rules for this are still being formulated.

Muthukadu lake project

IIT-Madras have developed a hybrid solar-powered desalination plant. A solar photovoltaic panel is dovetailed to a power grid or a backup diesel generator that will power up during periods of weak sunshine and at night and keep producing water through a reverse osmosis plant.

The pilot plant produces 2.4 kilolitres a day. Since the system does not use backup batteries, maintenance and operational costs are minimal. Efforts to scale up the pilot plant to provide 1 million litres per day. The project was envisioned to be implemented near Muttukkadu, a few years ago but was shelved due to lack of funds.

At Dharmapuri hospital

A pilot solar plant designed by the institute is used to heat infant warmers at a hospital in Dharmapuri and provide energy required to store vaccines in refrigerators.Stand alone systems are quite useful and stand a competitive chance, especially in remote areas, where transport of diesel to power diesel generators costs a lot,” said Jeevan Das, a research scholar who is working on the Suryajal project.

Gujarat solar model

Launched towards the end of 2010, the Rs. 9,000-crore Gujarat Solar Park, set up on government wasteland in north Gujarat, has already been producing 214 MW,making it the first State to generate such solar energy capacity at a single location.

Stretched to 5,000 acres, from the present 2,669 acres, the Charanka Park, located at a village of Patan district, will generate 500 MW. This will make it Asia’s largest solar farm. Gujarat’s total installed capacity is 605 MW, and projects are operational in 10 districts.The government is looking for more wasteland in north Gujarat’s Banaskantha district for setting up another solar park.

Gandhinagar, being envisioned as model solar city, already has solar rooftop systems ranging from 1 kilowatt (kW) to 150 kW at more than 150 locations. This covers a total of two acres of rooftop area, providing 1 per cent of the total energy consumption in the capital. Also, the new building of the Gujarat Pollution Control Board is completely powered by solar energy

The solar page articles:

Sunny future

Green obligations

No Clouds here

The sunshine state

Good tech getting better

The Atlantic magazine article discusses the phenomenon of today’s children spending more and more time with digital technology. What does it mean for their development ? Hanna Rosin, who disagrees with the American Academy of Pediatrics,  favours  the idea of children engaged with interactive digital media for their development.. She reckons a child who is adept with iPad hardly needs any teaching. The Academy of Pediatrics wouldn’t recommend children’s exposure to digital media, even though over 90 percent of American parents say their kids – even 2-year olds – are exposed to some form of electronic media at home.

The question, as Hanna phrased it,  how would you want today’s children to deal with technology ? Parents who, in their own childhood learned to  curb technology , would want their kids to keep off it. Those who realise  inevitability of increasing role of technology in daily life would rather want to see their young ones to integrate technology , making it a natural, organic part of life.

Hanna Rosin is not among those who believe free and open exposure leads to addiction. As part of parenting those bringing up young kids amid a digital clutter around their house – smart phone,  iPad, computer, interactive Tv etc -  would do well to be discriminative enough to understand when their kids engaged with iPad are concentrating intensely ; and when  iPad becomes an addiction. Incidence of iPad addiction among children is a rare phenomenon, says Hanna Roasin.

Sidharth at computer  (YouTube)

Source: OMR Resident

it was a mistake. And, I hope Mr Kuppuswamy, for whom the mail was meant, has got his flight ticket. Such is life  in our digitized world.  Danny Hillis,  computer researcher and scientist at MIT,  says the unfathomable dimension that the Internet has assumed in recent decades made us increasingly vulnerable to mistakes. He refers to an Internet mistake that happened in April last year, when, for a few hours a lot of the Internet traffic, including online messages between US military installations, was getting re-routed through China. China telecom said it was accidental.  And the fault was rectified as soon as they detected it.

This example highlights  how vulnerable the Internet system is to a cyber attack. Dr Hillis raises another possibility – what, if the world wide Internet were to crash. It’s a possibility that hadn’t occurred to me till I heard Dr Hillis on TED Talk. Internet has become so much a part of life, for so many, that a world without the Net would be unimaginable. In our chip-embedded world there is hardly any aspect of one’s life that remains untouched by the Internet technology. Internet today is being used in far too many different ways than what people in the 80s could have imagined. Billions of Internet users, virtually  enslaved to digital trappings, face consequences of mistakes – unintended or deliberate -  made by someone, somewhere  else, anywhere in the world.

Dr. Hills cited an instance where all aircraft to the west of Mississippi  got grounded because a single routing card in Salt Lake city had a bug in it. Nearer home, in Chennai recently, several incoming flights were diverted to Hyderabad, Bangalore and elsewhere because of a minor fire affecting a computer system at ATC tower. The wired world is getting increasingly worried about cyber mishaps. We don’t even know of the scale and scope of the impact that a cyber disaster could cause.

Danny Hillis Proposition 1 -  the Internet, as we know it, could crash,  bringing the world to a standstill.

Proposition 2 – we need a Plan B -  a clear back-up system that is independent of the Internet, made out of completely different sets of building blocks. How Dr Hillis would go about it is something I can’t understand.

What I do understand is,  that his Plan B idea sounds a note of caution to the digitally developing India. While digitizing land records, treasury payments, of pension, relief, and issue of varied documents and entitlement certificates  the govt. would do well to retain,  as a back-up, the traditional transactional mode. This would help minimize impact on the vulnerable sections in the event of a digital conk-out . Irony is, people who are not Internet users have their lives affected by an accident or cyber attack in the digitized world.

Danny Hillis:The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B

Solar power system,  once installed,  needs almost no maintenance other than a good rinsing of solar panels with a garden hose, now and then.  Solar power generating system,  they say,  has a 30-year life span.

PayPal founder  Elon Musk,  who is into solar energy leasing among other things, reckons that in less than 20 years we would be generating more power from solar than any other energy source. Today’s   challenge is in  keeping the cost of installation and financing reasonably low.  A business advantage  in  leasing is,  the company can claim govt.subsidy/rebate  as owner of solar power system.  In a more competitive  set-up  it  may have to pass on part of the subsidy to  customers.  The leasing company will  be entitled to carbon credit.

Elon Musk has a company – Solar City – that is focused on leasing solar panels to consumers and businesses. They  help  people calculate how much money they can expect to save with solar panels,   sets up the financing,  and coordinates the installation of the panel.

And then,  came a bio-gas plant that converts kitchen waste into electricity.  I don’t know who made the first move,  but Vivekananda Kendra -  a Kanyakumari based NGO -   designed and set up this plant,  on a reclaimed  patch  of the municipal garbage dump yard.  The  waste-to-energy plant  is run by another NGO – Hand-in-Hand.

Mr M Raja of  Hand-in-Hand who conducted us around the plant -  a group of  OMR Greens  members from Padur -  explained at length the waste-to-energy conversion process,  from door-step collection of food waste to transmission of the converted electricity that powered 25 street lights.  Over 40 waste collectors are engaged;  and their remunaration is covered by the collection charges paid by the eating houses.  A minimum levy for kitchen waste collection is Rs.50 a month  and the chrages vary in accordance with the quantum of food waste collection.

The Mamamallapuram  waste-to-energy plant is a collective enterprise,  of several stakeholders. The plant,  designed by an NGO, and located on panchayat land,  is run by another NGO,  with  monthly contributions by eateries.  The 10 kilowatts generator running on bio-gas produced by Kirloskars,   costing Rs.20 lakhs  (at the 2008 price level),  is a donation from Sweden.  Under the renewable energy programme  the town panchayat is eligible to Rs.4 lakh subsidy.

Mr Raja,  so knowledgeable on so many aspects,  couldn’t,  however, tell us  the one thing  we needed to know -  the unit cost for producing power from kitchen waste.  OMR Greens  would  want to sell this waste-t0-energy  proposal  to  Padur  panchayat  and other stakeholders.   Ideally,  there should be a waste-to-energy unit for every panchayat  and in setting it up all stakeholders in the neighbourhood  need to be involved -  residents,  other individuals and institutions  generating waste,  property developers responsible for mushrooming residential high-rises ,  and the panchayat.

A bio-gas plant developed by Bhaba Atomic Research Centre (BARC) lends itself to  decentralized waste disposal system. For a plant with capacity to process one tonne waste daily requires  no more than 300 sq.ft.  of land.  And a tonne of bio-degradeable waste can produce 25-30 kg. of methane,  about 150 kg. carbon dioxide and  nearly 60 kg of organic manure.  Besides kitchen and veg. market wastes,  and those generated in abattoirs,  the BARC bio-gas model can take in even hazardous biological sludge.

The plant,  they say can be operated by unskilled workers  such as rag-picker  Ramesh  and his folks at Padur .   All they require is one-month training.

I have heard Padur residents get water supplied from a  lake in their backyard. Truckloads of water Mantri Synergy residents used to get before borewells in their complex got  activated was,  presumably,  sourced from this lake.  Oddly enough,  I didn’t, till now,  bring myself to visiting  the lake that I can view  from my high-rise.  Trip to the lake entails a walk through narrow, not so clean,  street through  Padur.    A  lakeside walk early this morning proved educative, if  thought-provoking. Winding our way through the unmade road my wife and I felt  embarrassed, on occasions,  at,  what may well be a common sight for the locals .  It was as if, with our appearance,  we intruded on the early morning  routine of some people. Their tell-tale movement  close to the lake, so early in the day,  suggest the following:
1) There is a crying need for a row of public toilets, well watered through a pipeline  from the lake,  for the benefit of those now using lakeside bushes for the purpose.
2) The water body needs to be fenced off in populated segments , making  it inaccessible to public.
3) The muddy pathway that runs along the lake is so littered with snails that there is case for a signpost, saying,  ‘Snails Crossing: Tread/Drive Carefully’.

Snails, out and about in scores, had the run of the road , in early mornings. Snails, they say, move about at night, and hibernate during the day. They detest brightness of the sun. And before the sun came up the snails seem to be ‘hurrying’ to their hideouts. Speaking of snail’s pace, they say  the fastest of the species can move 50 yards per hour.

The need for fencing off the lake can’t be overstated. Tamil Nadu water  supply undertaking has a pumping station that was put up five years back  under a community drinking water supply scheme  funded by the Asian Development Bank.  Lake-fencing, and provision of public toilets, which might not have been necessary when the drinking water scheme was launched,  in 2008,  now appears  critical to the continued  survival of the lake as a source of water for the ever growing Padur and its OMR neighbourhood.

Suggestion: Engineering students/faculty in neighbourhood  institutions such as Hindustan University  and Mohd. Sathak Engineering College can take up Padur lake improvement as a class project. The project report they come up with can become a campaign theme for OMR Greens for mobilizing public support for implementation of the lake conservation scheme.

Snails ln the lakeside road

Bullock-cart

Sourced from OMR Resident

A scene outside Raghavendra temple at Narayana Sastri Road, Mysore.

A survey of places of worship in Delhi  found little evidence of  Christian food charities  in the city ;  mosques no longer opened  their doors to the homeless and hungry; and Hindu temples,  mostly served sweet and oily food sporadically, on fixed sacred days, and rarely with dignity.   Eating houses selling  plastic tokens  in Delhi are located in the vicinity of  places of worship that attract alms seekers.  It is a business model adopted by  eating houses ,  for the benefit  charity-minded pilgrims.

The food token system can be adopted for a drive against hunger,  elsewhere in the country.   Traders and restaurant owners associations in various localities should take a lead.  An operating system for the issue of tokens  can be  evolved by management experts.  MBA students can take it up as class project.  OMR Greens  would welcome an initiative  in this regard by management students at   Hindustan University.  We can approach traders association and eating houses at  Padur-Kelambakkam area  with a project proposal.

The  ‘luncheon voucher’  and  ‘food coupons’  issued by IT companies to employees can be a working model for restaurant and  traders associations to adopt.   Food token can be  priced on cost-sharing basis, and  all three stake holders -  traders body, eating houses in a locality, and their customers who buy the food tokens -   would be  partners  in a  CSR project (community social responsibility) to work for freedom from hunger..

The last time  we interacted,  this was a few years back , she said the library she started for municipal school kids  wasn’t setting the Ooty lake on fire.  In a blogpost last month  kalyani wrote, ‘ children drop in at the library sporadically’  and those showing up on a given Sat. didn’t necessarily turn up the subsequent weekend – ‘so its hard to sustain any program’.

That was when Kalyani had occasion to attend a PTA meeting at Thalaiyattumund Municipal school,  and interact with some parents.  What did they want their children to learn ?  To speak English,  to learn Hindi, computer, karate, drawing…. the sort of things children  didn’t get at a municipal school,  but would need to get ahead in life.

Reinventing itself in 2013,  Siragugal has started  a three-month  ‘Speak English’  programme for 20 municipal school kids.  An Omni van transports them to Siragugal  library daily  after school.  The parents are asked to  pay Rs.500 per month towards transport and so they have a greater sense of commitment,  says Kalyani. She adds that they use material bought from Eureka, Chennai…Every week they pick a topic,  teach  vocabulary, with stress on dialogue,  question and answer, related educational games and activities. Volunteers are welcome to drop in,  so that children can interact with people from varied walks of life.  Saturdays are for painting, games and much else.

The next time you happen by Ooty, do  find time to drop in at  Siragugal for an evening with Kalyani’s  children.  Her mail   siragugalooty@gmail.com