Hydel power: promises and pitfalls

Live Mint , Monday, December 01, 2014
Correspondent : Jairam Ramesh

India has had a long and notable history in hydel power. Its first hydroelectric power plant was commissioned in Karnataka way back in 1902. It has produced a number of distinguished hydro engineers, the foremost of whom must surely be M. Visvesvaraya who was bestowed the Bharat Ratna only a year after it was first awarded in 1954 to C. Rajagopalachari, S. Radhakrishnan and C.V. Raman. Engineer’s Day is celebrated every year on 15 September, the day Visvesvaraya was born. Another star in this galaxy was K.L. Rao, who was responsible for the Nagarjunasagar project in the Krishna basin in Andhra Pradesh and a Union minister in the 1960s. In the context of climate change concerns from carbon dioxide emissions, hydel power has assumed special importance. Brazil, which gets around 80% of its electricity from hydel sources, accounts for just about 2% of global greenhouse emissions and has therefore considerable flexibility (but it is vulnerable on account of large-scale deforestation in the Amazon). India gets some 18% of its electricity from hydel sources and is looking to increase this share in order to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, particularly coal. So far, only around 27% of the economically exploitable (large) hydel potential of around 149,000 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity has been developed and another 5% is under development. Hence, it would appear that India has substantial room to manoeuvre in hydel power. Undoubtedly, along with an increase in the share of nuclear, solar and wind energy, an increase in the share of hydel power will form a crucial part of India’s climate change strategy. But it would be wrong to assume that hydel power is without its own ecological hazards, some severe. Reservoir-induced seismicity concerns have come into public focus after what happened at Koyna in Maharashtra in the mid-1960s, which is still reverberating. The 30-year-old Narmada Bachao Andolan, which is truly a watershed in India’s recent environmental history, put issues of submergence and displacement on the nation’s agenda. In the early 1980s, the mass movement to protect the fragile Silent Valley in Kerala highlighted issues relating to the protection of valuable biodiversity that come under threat from hydel projects. In the past few years, the development of hydel projects in states such as Uttarakhand have sensitised the country to what happens to water flows in a river from a series of such projects in the same river basin. Ramaswamy Iyer, one of India’s most eminent water administrators and thinkers, put it bluntly recently at a seminar in the capital: “It is argued, and widely believed, that hydroelectric projects, particularly run-of-the-river ones, are environmentally benign, that they are ‘green’. This is a completely wrong view. First, there is a break in the river between the point of diversion to the turbines and the point of return of the waters to the river, and the break can be very long, even a 100km in some cases; and there would be a series of such breaks in the event of a cascade of projects. Does the river still remain a river? Secondly, these projects operate as peaking projects, i.e., the turbines operate in accordance with the market demand for electricity, which means that the waters are held back in pondage and released when the turbines need to operate, resulting in huge diurnal variations in downstream flows.” He adds: “Instead of respecting the natural flow and diverting the minimum unavoidably necessary, the approach is to abstract the maximum water from the river and grudgingly let flow a minimum. In the controversy about the planning of hydroelectric projects, the suggestion that at least 50% of lean season flows and 30% of high flows should be left free is strongly resisted.” The geographic distribution of the unharnessed hydel potential also presents issues in project planning. Some of this potential is in rivers over which there are bitter disputes between states (such as the one between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery); some in ecologically fragile areas such as Uttarakhand; some in areas where working conditions are not exactly as easy as in Jammu and Kashmir. And the bulk of the remaining potential (54,000 MW out of a total of around 100,000 MW) lies in the Brahmaputra basin in the northeast and more particularly in Arunachal Pradesh, which alone accounts for some one-third of India’s ultimate potential. The development of hydel projects in Arunachal Pradesh, especially on the Siang, has implications going well beyond meeting the demand for electricity. It has, in fact, larger strategic importance which gains urgency given China’s own plans to construct hydel projects on the Brahmaputra as it flows through Tibet. But projects in the northeast should not be taken up without carrying out a cumulative environmental impact assessment and without taking into account the real concerns of the local population. Unfortunately, anyone raising questions on the execution of hydel projects in the northeast is immediately branded anti-national by the ruling establishment in New Delhi. There may well be some professional agitators, but there are many sober voices advocating caution. Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati has, for instance, raised a number of issues about the Lower Subansiri project, which simply cannot be wished away. Hydel projects should not lead to the growth of sentiments that see them as exploitative, bringing benefits to the rest of the country while the northeast itself bears their ecological and social costs. So far, hydel projects in India have been seen largely as engineering ventures. To a large extent, they indeed are and the country’s hydro professionals have many technical achievements to their credit. But clearly this narrow approach is no longer sustainable. Harnessing India’s full hydel potential in substantial measure will require a whole mindset change. The author is a former Union minister and Rajya Sabha MP.

 
SOURCE : http://www.livemint.com/Industry/9H3lHcUxfmkJosGGbhvXtJ/Hydel-power-promises-and-pitfalls.html
 


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