Wind energy is the best option amongst non-conventional sources

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: Last year an Indian company announced that it would be setting up a 24 mw windfarm at a project cost of Rs. 120 crore. This works out to an investment of about $1.2 per watt, which is very significantly lower than the other tried and tested non-conventional source of renewable energy, namely solar photo voltaic cells, where the initial investment is still as high as $5-$8 per peak watt.

One continues to hear lot of noise about renewable sources of energy, but in reality there is very little on the ground. Despite the fact that we need to add almost 100,000 mw to our installed power capacity in the country, we are probably not serious about exploring full potential of the alternate sources.

Considering the initial investment on solar energy, this option is obviously not feasible till some revolutionary changes take place and the cost of photo voltaic cells drops down to the region of $1 per peak watt. However, at Rs 50 per watt investment, wind energy certainly seems to be an eminently feasible option, especially considering the fact that the investment figure of about $1 million per mw is more or less the same as that for conventional thermal power plants.

There is of course the question of wind speeds in large parts of India and number of hours for which the wind turbines would be operational so as to determine the expected output of energy from a particular installation over, say, a whole year. Typically, one could look at about 500 hours per annum in Rajasthan and in Tamil Nadu. I am not sure if data is available for many other regions of the country, where there are good wind speeds.

Detractors of non-conventional energy sources might well argue that at such a low utilisation level (500 to 1,000 hours per annum), which represents only about 5-10 % of the total time, we are grossly over-estimating the utility of such installations. However, one should not ignore the fact that first, these installations do not cause any environmental pollution at all. Second, there are no recurring costs unlike in a thermal plant where, coal and diesel constitute huge inputs, in addition to the cost of maintenance and of course, the headaches of gross pollution and fly ash disposal etc. And finally, solar cells also don’t collect energy 24 hours a day!