Electrically Charged...

Well, I have been a flake and haven't posted on this blog for eons. But a conversation yesterday touched on something that brings me back over here. The issue is electricity, or more to the point, the lack of it back in the motherland. The issue also is, numbers.

At this moment in the 21st century, there are 600 million Indians who live without electric supply. Yeah, 600 million - the NYT had an article about it earlier. These people have no bulbs, fans, fridges, ACs, whatever. Edison, anyone??

Several thoughts come to mind:

(a) Who is to blame?
(b) What is needed to change the situation?
(c) How much will it cost and who will pay for it?
(d) How long will it take?

Question (a) is very interesting while the rest are merely depressing. The fun begins by blaming the British colonials because they are such nice, fat targets - rather like the dodos of Mauritius. And it ends with the gung-ho breeding habits of Indian couples.

Essentially Britain needed India's mineral and agricultural resources, it's sea ports and a captive market for British goods. To this end they established a very good Railway system, a strong central administrative service, courts and the Indian Army, all of which survive today as powerful entities. What they did not need was electric supply for the millions under their rule, medical care or an adequate food supply. (Hence the reprimands for White Western kids who are naughty enough to leave their vegetables on the table while "all those Indians are starving"). So India inherited a massive electricity, health care and food problem. All of these too, survive to this day.

Initially, Indian rulers started fairly well in the sense that they actually gave a shit about the country i.e. people like Nehru. Since food was the most pressing problem in the early independence years, that is where Nehru spent most of his energies, resulting in the green revolution and India's self-sufficiency in food production. By the late 70s, the famines were over.

Unfortunately, Nehru also had the silly notion that India should be socialist which resulted in the creation of the most fucked up bureaucracy possible. Over time this socialism, government controls over the economy and the bureaucracy would spell doom for those very people it was meant to help. As enterprise, business and investment came to a standstill, tax revenues came to a standstill too. There was soon no money for elementary education, health care or infrastructure such as roads and electricity. The only thing that prospered was the government bureaucracy which invented a new system of permits, licenses and quotas everyday. It grew fat on paperwork...the true successor to the British Raj. The only way business could function was by breaking the rules and so began the culture of corruption and bribery in politics - the second largest growth industry after the bureaucracy. It was all downhill from there on, India the lumbering Asian elephant, the "Hindu rate of growth", leave-the-country-if-you-can, brain-drain, no opportunity...

However, this did not stop us, as a country, from having a whole lot of sex. Corruption in the public polity was matched only by the ejaculatory enthusiasm of the masses, undiminished by condoms, birth control pills or any other barrier between the happy sperm and the eager egg. The Indian female's fertility rate climbed as the per capita income went down.

Well, now India has 600 million people living without electricity, fully 55% of its population. Let's sober up and look at some numbers.

600 million people imply about 120 million households using an average Indian family size of 5. Let us give each household about o.5 KW (kilowatt) of peak usage. Mind you, this is hardly an excessive number. It would not run a single AC - just enough for a few bulbs and ceiling fans. The average American household uses about four times more electricity at the peak with an average household size of only 3 !

So, we need 120 million x 0.5 KW = 60 million KW of electric generating capacity. We are not talking about what is needed to improve the power situation in cities like New Delhi where there are 5-10 powercuts everyday. We are not talking about all those industries that would be needed to employ these 600 million dirt-poor people and or the power needed to irrigate their farms. Just subsistence-level electricity for the masses without any at all at present.

Ahhh...money, money, money. So if India went...

* Nuclear, it would need about 60 mammoth sized nuclear plants to be built. At a cost of about $100 billion.
* Coal-based, it would need 30-60 large-sized coal plants. Cost: $60-100 billion.
* Wind-based, it would need 12,000 - 60,000 windmills. Cost: $120 billion or so,

What about hydroelectric? It depends if the project can even get off the ground. The Narmada Valley project is currently stalled because of agitation over some tribal lands being submerged. Even if it was completed, it would produce less than 3% of what is needed.

Would a project even as gigantic as China's Three Gorges solve the problem? Nope. Three Gorges is projected to produce about 20 million KW. One would need three Three Gorges to solve India's problem.

But this does help us understand something. The number of people displaced by these hydroelectric projects is far smaller than the number of people they help. Suppose the Three Gorges project was in India. Suppose also, that it displaces about 1 million people (same as in China). But it would produce enough electricity for 200 million people who don't have any!

Anyway, where will the money come from to solve this problem? The total expenditure of the Indian Government, based on tax revenues, is about $130 billion per year. A look at the figures tells us that at the very maximum, no more than $10 billion per year is available for electricity.

Given that power plants take 5-10 years to be built to the point of operation...well, it would be about 20 years in the best of circumstances before all these millions of people could turn on a bulb. This is not counting all the protesters who would gather at short notice whenever a new power project begins construction. The Narmada project has been delayed by ten years because of this.

Well. These big power projects have environmental issues. They displace people and it sucks if you happen to live in the wrong place. But they also provide benefits to many many more people than they displace. And we are not talking about luxury, just basic electricity needs.

If one doesn't like it, what is the alternative? Does a source of power exist that would disrupt no one's life and yet be affordable? Or do we just condemn the 600 million people to live in the dark...