India needs to move to homegrown manufacturing of cheap solar and green hydrogen for storage.
Solar energy is something that India gets a lot of. Especially during summer solar energy could help with the extra demand in energy because of high heat.
> India needs to move to homegrown manufacturing of cheap solar
I doubt India could manufacture solar cheaper than China which already has all of the necessary ecosystems for massive scale solar panel manufacturing.
> solar energy could help with the extra demand in energy because of high heat
It may seem counter-intuitive, but solar panel efficiency is affected negatively by temperature increases. Most solar panels have a temperature coefficient of around -0.3% / °C to -0.5% / °C. So at 50C , you're expecting more than 10% loss.
Most people don't realize a lot of electronics just isn't designed to operate in such extremes. Plastics start to lose rigidity, glues start to detach, liquid crystals start to behave slightly differently.
Additionally Pakistan installed a giant solar farm it lost 30%+ of projected efficiency due to getting covered in dust, requiring a large budget to constantly clean them. So hot/dusty places are bad places for these. Despite a lot of sci-fi books which talk about covering deserts in solar farms.
> It's not unfathomable that a cheap, automated method of doing this could be developed.
And that cheap, automated method will require energy as well. Perhaps a bigger concern maybe that such a method may require a cheap fluid to prevent damage to the panel coatings and that might be water, already a scarce resource in those places.
What they did is explained here, the process is quite involved:
> Each of the 400,000 installed panels required one litre of water to clean. A 15 days cleaning cycle required 124 million litres of water (enough to sustain 9000 people) while rain in the Cholistan desert is rare and far between. Providing such huge amount of water in desert terrain, became a challenging and daunting task for management team. Besides, the manual cleaning methods allowed setting of dust before it was re-cleaned.
Every day they're using 20.7 litres of water to keep a single panel clean. It's an interesting problem, but I'm certain there's a better way if one were willing to develop better automation.
Some of their systems are already deployed in India. One example:
Site: Bikaner Solar Park
Location: Bikaner, Rajasthan, India
Capacity: 438 MW
Bikaner solar Park it is located in the north part of Rajasthan surrounded by the Thar Desert. While providing optimal irradiation, this geographic location poses great challenges in terms of soiling losses, which fluctuate between 17-25%. As such, it requires between 12-36 conventional wet manual cleaning cycles.
With the installation of Ecoppia’s E4 fully automated and water free cleaning solution, there was no longer a need to perform manual wet cleaning, saving billions of liters of water every year. Moreover, Ecoppia’s daily cleaning, significantly reduced soiling loses, maximizing the site’s productivity.
That is a good point. They are perfectly situated to capitalize on the sun.
They have the manpower as well.
Unfortunately, politics often get in the way of progress.
India has funded solar panel research and development, but it is a small country for the number of people who need the power. As mentioned, hot and dusty too, both are bad for solar panel efficiency.
Well we should be looking at ways to get around the dust and heat through innovation. Perhaps more durable materials would be a start. And it does not have to power the whole country - even 50% will provide a relief. People need to stop thinking in binary terms when it comes to energy.
