by Justin Guay, via Sierra Club

A while back I wrote a post on the need to get India’s solar boom right. I wrote the piece because it was obvious that solar energy is primed to take off in India and it was clear there are two paths the country could take: distribute that boom to benefit the 300 million people still waiting for the grid, or forcibly centralize a resource that is most effective when distributed.

A year later, installations have grown at a blistering pace — from 80 MW a year ago to over 1 GW — but they are almost entirely centralized. And now, the question is more important than ever: To centralize or not to centralize?

Let’s start with hard reality: The grid is never coming to rural India. No matter what policy makers want to believe, decades of attempts and huge gains in supply have yielded little increase in electrification. More importantly, off grid solar installations have been dramatically cheaper than grid extension because they compete with the huge costs of extending the grid and the huge costs of diesel and heavily-polluting kerosene. That’s why the future of rural electrification is decentralized clean energy — something even the very serious IEA recognizes.

But it’s not just the IEA that gets this. Politicians are catching on as well. Take Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, whose sole political platform is delivering energy access to the 100 million people of Bihar. To achieve this lofty goal (only 18% of the population currently has access) Bihar is going to need a distributed clean energy revolution because coal-gate has deepened the already immense problems of the coal sector, making the possibility of a coal fired future impossible. If Kumar wants to remain in office, he has to rely on distributed solar.

And, of course, distributed grid-tied installations reduce peak load which can help avoid blackouts like the historic one India just suffered. In short, distributed is the way to go.

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by Justin Guay, via the Sierra Club

The U.S. Ex-Im Bank and its president Fred Hochberg have never met a coal project they didn’t like.

At times it’s so bad we don’t know what century the institution thinks it is operating in. Now, despite a worldwide uproar over the Bank’s interest in one of the world’s largest coal ‘mega-mines’ in Australia, it has been linked to another Australian mega mine that would bring coal across the Great Barrier Reef. Underwriting this potential destruction of the Great Barrier Reef is an unacceptable use of U.S. tax payer dollars — and it’s time Ex-Im Bank came clean on its involvement.

It’s not surprising to hear over-eager developers link the Ex-Im Bank to these projects because the institution has a long history of supporting fossil fuel projects. And that track record is getting worse. It got so bad that the Sierra Club wrote an open letter to President Fred Hochberg after we witnessed first hand the destruction these projects are wreaking on communities and livelihoods (check out our blog on the Sasan coal project in India).

But our pleas were callously ignored as President Hochberg okay-ed a massive expansion of coal finance in every corner of the globe. From Kusile in South Africa, to Sasan in India, to Xcoal in the U.S., to the recently proposed mines in Australia, it appears that Ex-Im Bank cares little for the environmental damage the institution is causing around the world — not to mention the reputation of this administration.

The problem, however, is that the public does. And that public stretches from Australia where the mining would take place, to India where the coal would be burned, to the U.S. where the financing would come from. This global outcry was captured in part by Avaaz’s petition to #savethereef (consider taking a minute to contact Fred Hochberg personally via twitter: @fredhochberg), but also by media scrutiny in India, the U.S., the UK and Australia. It appears that while President Hochberg may consider designations like “World Heritage Site” pesky obstacles, the global public considers them treasures.

Which is why Greenpeace Australia’s recent report on massive coal export expansion plans that would trample the Great Barrier Reef — and the global climate — was so damning. They found that if underwritten by institutions like Ex-Im Bank, the world would add emissions equivalent to a country the size of Canada while increasing traffic through one of the world’s greatest natural wonders. For an excellent visual representation of this lunacy check out Greenpeace’s short video:

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by Justin Guay, Ashish Fernandes, and Chaitanya Kumar

A $33 billion “Coal-Gate” scandal is rocking the Indian government. This “mother of all scams” created a windfall for private developers who secured public resources at rock bottom prices.

As a beleaguered Prime Minister Singh takes to defending this egregious allocation of public resources, it’s important to recognize that Coal-Gate isn’t just happening in India. It’s happening everywhere, including the U.S., and it must be stopped.

An Indian supporter holds a placard during a protest against what they say is illegal migration of Muslims from Bangladesh to the northeastern Indian state of Assam. The conflict in the state could get worse as the effects of climate change become more drastic.

by Arpita Bhattacharyya

Recent violence between the Bodo tribe and immigrant minorities in the northeastern Indian state of Assam has cost the lives of at least 96 people and caused more than 300,000 residents to flee their homes for refugee camps. The violence also led to mass panic among northeastern migrants across India, when text messages and videos circulated social media sites warning of attacks on northeastern migrants in southern Indian cities such as Bangalore and Pune in retaliation for the deaths of Muslim minorities in Assam.

The violence and resulting panic revealed a fragile peace in Assam and demonstrated the speed with which historical tensions can bubble over into larger confrontations that could roil the whole country. A lot of this tension could worsen with the confluence of climate change, migration patterns, and community security in Assam and India—a confluence that the Center for American Progress is examining in a series of papers and events on climate change, migration, and security. Before looking at those patterns in Assam, let’s first take a look back at Assam’s history to better understand today’s conflicts.

Assam’s troubled past

Assam is located in the northeastern part of India and shares a border with China, Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. This underdeveloped region, which is connected to India politically by a small land bridge, is also known as the “Seven Sisters” and includes the states Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram. The surrounding countries’ cultures have influenced Assam, creating a patchwork of ethnic, religious, and linguistic traditions that distinguish the Seven Sisters from the rest of India. The Bodos are one of the main indigenous tribes located in the western region of Assam. In the 2001 Census the Bodos made up around 5 percent of Assam’s entire population.

The Bodo insurgents have been fighting for years for statehood in India. In 2003 they were granted special status through the creation of the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts in exchange for ceasing their insurgency. The total area of Bodoland is about 8,970 square kilometers—roughly the size of Cyprus—and includes more than 3,000 villages. The status allows the Bodoland Territorial Council to legislate on communal-level issues such as agriculture, education, and tourism. Though the Bodos govern the districts, the tribe only makes up one-third of the overall population therein. The remainder of the residents belong to other indigenous tribal groups or are native Assamese.

Muslims are the second-largest group in the region, and tensions have long simmered between Bodos and Muslim residents over land-ownership rights. The most recent incident before the current violence was in 2008, when fighting between the two groups resulted in 55 deaths, more than 100 injuries, and 200,000 people escaping to refugee camps. The main issue between the two groups is land, with Bodos claiming that undocumented Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh are taking land rightfully owned by Bodos. Muslim communities, however, view the accusation of illegal Muslim Bangladeshi settlement as a false campaign to restrict their rights and drive Muslims from the area.

Moreover, Bengali-speaking Muslims settled in the area long before the British Partition created the state of Bangladesh in 1947. This makes it difficult to determine who is a Bengali-speaking Muslim long-term resident versus an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant.

Before 1947 India and Bangladesh were unified and ruled as British India—thus the issue of illegal immigration did not exist. Following independence from Britain, present-day Bangladesh was East Pakistan until 1971, when East Pakistan fought for independence from West Pakistan. During that war, 10 million East Pakistanis (including many Bengali-speaking Muslims) fled to India. Given this history, it is difficult to distinguish between Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam who lived in the area before the Partition, those who moved during the 1971 war as refugees, and those who moved after the war, including the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants whom the Bodos distinguish.

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by Justin Guay, via Sierra Club

Just days after the historic blackout reminded us that centralized coal is the problem, not the solution to India’s energy woes, a new era of entrepreneurs marked the beginning of a truly revolutionary effort to deliver energy access.

The landmark deal that marked their arrival was lost amidst the coverage of the blackout and the continued death spiral the coal sector finds itself in. Nonetheless, the deal between OMC Power, and Bharti Infratel (India’s largest mobile phone provider) to provide clean renewable energy to its off grid cell phone towers was historic. It marks the arrival of Community Power and it couldn’t have come a moment too soon.

As my colleagues at GSMA have demonstrated in a number of excellent reports, the potential for Community Power to deliver where the centralized grid has failed is tremendous. But what is it? Check out a few of these videos from OMC and let me explain.

As mobile phones leapfrog traditional infrastructure, a population of 548 million un-electrified mobile phone users has driven the mobile phone industry to fall all over itself to help them keep their phones charged.

That’s because when people’s phones are charged they use them more, and when people use them more the mobile phone companies make more money — significantly more money. This has created a dynamic that turns the traditional view of delivering energy access on its head. Instead of seeing it as an “expensive development project” it is increasingly becoming a lucrative business proposition.

It just so happens that taking advantage of this proposition solves another vexing problem for mobile phone providers: costly diesel. By switching out the expensive diesel gen sets that power their off-grid “base stations” — radio towers that convert electricity into radio waves — the companies save money.  In India there are an estimated 400,000 towers — over 150,000 of which don’t have reliable access to the grid.

This is where Community Power comes in.

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by Justin Guay, via The Sierra Club

Of all the headlines around India’s historic blackout none summed up the truth more than the Onion:  ”300 million without electricity after restoration of the power grid.”

In fact, when asking Indian colleagues about the blackout most acknowledged it as simply par for the course. That’s because India’s over reliance on a centralized grid powered largely by coal has always been a failure — a fact that most Indians face through prolonged power cuts. That’s not to mention the 300 million people who don’t even have access to the grid.

The only thing unique about this blackout was the duration and size, which exposed just how epic this failure has become. As the analysis rolls in, the fundamental lesson is clear: coal, and the centralized grid it powers, is the problem, not the solution to India’s energy woes.

As my colleague Gordon Scott pointed out in a post last week, India is currently learning the most important lesson about its over-dependence on outdated, centralized coal-fired power. It is simply not flexible enough to accommodate India’s real problem: peak demand (the kind that happens when 20 million Delhi inhabitants turn on their AC or fans all at once). Instead coal chugs along at a steady rate unable to keep up with the flexible demands of daily life, which regularly leads to blackouts.

Worse, even if India decided it was worth it to massively overbuild coal plants to avoid this problem, the coal sector is such an absolute train wreck it would be impossible. That’s because costs are skyrocketing and the transportation infrastructure is so out of date that the country can’t get the coal where they it to be – the plants themselves. This combination of factors, not ‘environmental regulations,’ has forced the existing coal fleet and many proposed plants to sit idle, half-completed, or even abandoned.

In essence, it’s a complete failure of what ‘very serious commentators’ call the ‘modern grid.’ These commentators suffer from an extreme failure of imagination — one that is tethered to the past and continuously looks in the rear view mirror. The truth is that countries like India need to, and are, building an entirely different form of grid from the bottom up. One that more accurately reflects their own realities and actually delivers energy to the poor – something the ‘modern grid’ has miserably failed to do.

Of course, they still have to face the problems they have inherited from trying to copy/paste a centralized grid from the West. So what can they do to solve peak problems with the grid they already have in place? Deploy lots and lots of distributed solar and efficiency.

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Indian children read without power as a consequence of blackouts.

More than 600 million people in the northern and eastern parts of India lost power on Tuesday, putting roughly half of India’s population in the dark.

While the specific causes behind the mass blackouts remain unclear, the underlying cause is clear – India is reliant on an aging, inefficient government coal power monopoly that can’t meet the country’s energy needs:

Some analysts said public outrage over the widespread outages may force Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government to tackle reforms in the crisis-riddled power sector. Fuel shortages are crippling coal and gas-fired plants, forcing them to run below capacity or shut down for long stretches; state utilities have billions of dollars of accumulated losses; and, as has been on stark display, the nation’s creaky grid needs upgrading.

“Unless this government wants to commit political suicide, there’s no way they can ignore this,” said Abhey Yograj, managing director of Tecnova, a consulting firm that advises foreign companies on India.

While some are suggesting that increasing domestic coal production is the necessary next step in addressing India’s power problems, it’s not so clear that’s the case. One of the principal barriers to cheap coal production is environmental protection, and for good reason: The IMF estimates that coal pollution kills about 70,000 Indians per year and development of coal in India (and China) is undermining efforts to decrease global carbon emissions. Further, Indian coal development can create underground fires that cause houses to fall into the earth and fuels the corruption in the Indian energy sector that’s holding back meaningful reform. Solar power is actually less expensive than diesel in India and renewables more broadly are becoming increasingly plausible alternatives to expanded coal development.

In fact, the Indian government is pushing a National Solar Mission aimed at generating 12.5 % of India’s total electricity from renewable resources by 2020. By the end of 2012, the Solar Mission called for 810 megawatts of installed panels, but, according to a recently released report, India passed the 1 gigawatt mark in June of this year, a full 6 months ahead of the plan for 22 gigawatts by 2022. The report also found that India had only about 506 megawatts of installed capacity as recently as March, meaning that the country doubled its efforts in only two moths.

India has vast rural populations that often have limited access to electricity. The Solar Mission aims to provide more reliable sources of power to those citizens while reducing energy cost, decreasing reliance on foreign coal, and ameliorating the consequences of India’s economic growth for the environment.

Max Frankel contributed to this post.