ENERGY TRANSITION IN THE INDIAN INDUSTRY

We are at the cusp of monumental changes across the world on many fronts like water, waste, energy management and foremost is multi-layered climate threat which has systemic implications on multiple fronts like agriculture, water, health, and overall its impact the economic systems of the country.

My own journey in energy transition began in the 60’s when I was in the 3rd standard.

I was studying in the summer heat of Jamshedpur and I was reprimanded by my eldest sister for using the fan. She switched off the ceiling fan and asked me to learn to bear the heat while studying without use of electricity. In hindsight, I am extremely grateful to her, she taught me EE-energy efficiency, resilience,  adaptation and mitigation – the words that are being used in the context of how to tango with climate change! Those lessons  I did not forget and I could sit in a room in Delhi’s summers without a fan.

Dancing with complexity

I learned EE in the deep bliss of a small pond in extreme geographical isolation when I was posted in Port Blair to run a small hotel in 1988. We stopped use of paper in many areas like moving from paper caps to cloth caps for the kitchen staff, the wasteful practice of using brown paper in the drawers of the guest rooms was replaced with lining the drawer with velvet cloth – a durable decision,  made manure out of food waste – it did not go to the landfill site, repurposed spent cooking oil to soap for washing utensils.

All these simple steps seem insignificant but it has two dimensions, of avoiding waste and defiling our natural resources lakes, rivers the seas and more importantly, the embodied energy of many products is avoided. Our hotel was situated on a hill slope and I observed that the soil was going into the sea during the heavy monsoon in Port Blair. Being a naive hotelier those days, the only thing that came to my mind was to address the soil erosion by cementing the slopes.