India Journal: Here Comes the Sun?

From the first early morning rays peaking over the horizon until the shadows of the evening, the sun here in Rajasthan is now brutal. The current weather is marked by a cloudless sky, a bit of a breeze, and temperatures pushing between 105 and 110 F. I could say a lot about this, but one item strikes me especially today: where’s the use of all of this solar energy? 

I see and hear persons touting solar energy as an alternative and renewable source of energy, and I know of others who pooh-pooh the idea. But if the practice of gathering and using solar energy has any value, it certainly should in this land of unremitting sunshine. The Indian electrical grid is shaky, as we know from occasional and (thankfully) relatively brief outages. We also know about last year’s system-wide outage that shut down service for a couple of days to an area including about 700 million persons. Of course, a huge number of persons have little or no access to electricity, so the blackout was an inconsequential event, but to millions of others working in offices contained in glass and concrete towers or in modern shopping malls, no electricity would have an impact similar to an outage in the U.S. Given the diversity of users in India, and the fact that a large number of users have their own generators and other sources of power, it strikes me that India provides a perfect proving ground for solar energy. Is it not economically viable? Must India continue to build and use terribly polluting coal-fired plants to produce electricity? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I’d love to hear from anyone who does have some answers.