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SPRD Media Monitoring 8/21/2017
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As India's Climate Changes, Farmers in the North Experiment with New Crops
Aug 20, 2017 | NPR
By Julie McCarthy
This article discusses a challenge that solar panels face in India: pollution. The panels must be consistently cleaned of grime to keep their capacity from dropping by 50% or more. The article also brought to light how decreased snowfall in the mountain region is allowing farmers to grow more crops. -
INTERVIEW - Proposed U.S. Aid Cuts Threaten 'Disaster' for World's Poor - Foundation Head
Aug 17, 2017 | Reuters
By Laurie Goering
This interview with Rajiv Shah discusses the proposed U.S. budget cuts to foreign aid, and what private philanthropic companies such as the Rockefeller Foundation can do to alleviate some of the damage. -
India Enters Global Smart-Meter Race to Fight Utility Losses
Aug 16, 2017 | Bloomberg
By Anindya Upadhyay
India is increasing it's smart meter capacity by installing more units in more regions. The installation of these meters will have a positive impact on power distribution and energy efficiency in the country. -
This is the World's Most Efficient Solar Panel
Aug 15, 2017 | World Economic Forum
By Tom Ward
Scientists have developed a solar cell that's more efficient than any other currently on the market by using innovative technology capable of capturing more parts of the solar spectrum. Innovation like this is crucial for the mitigating the effects of climate change.
Global News
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As India's Climate Changes, Farmers in the North Experiment with New Crops
Aug 20, 2017 | NPR
By Julie McCarthy
On a recent weekday, Vamsi Komarala guides me up to the rooftop of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, where he teaches physics. Fields of solar panels adorn the buildings.
I swipe an index finger across one of the panels to see if weeks of monsoon rains have washed it clean. My finger comes back filthy with grit.
Vamsi tells me the panels are washed twice a week, then explains the grime: "That is because in New Delhi, we have a lot of dust."
Dust is just one factor. The capital city and much of northern India are routinely shrouded in man-made pollutants. In fact, Delhi vies with Beijing for the dirtiest air in the world.
Many of India's 1.3 billion people — a fifth of the world's population — face pollution that is cutting short lives, stunting children's cognitive development and putting public health under terrific stress.
Air pollution is the leading risk factor for most deaths and disabilities in India, a country that's home to 13 of 20 of the world's most polluted cities.
The country's dilemma is stark: To lift millions from poverty, it will require ever more energy. But most of India's electricity is generated by coal-burning power plants. Millions of new cars choke the roads each year. Add to the mix the burning of garbage and crops, and it's a toxic cocktail that makes India the third-largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, after China and the United States.
Under pressure to cut these emissions — which contribute to global warming and climate change — India is turning to its greatest source of clean, renewable energy: sunshine.
It's drenched in it 300 days of every year. Already, solar energy is changing the landscape across New Delhi, and the deserts of Rajasthan. But pollution is diminishing its power.
Better air quality, better solar power production
A new study has found that air pollution cuts the capacity of solar panels to generate power — and the smaller the particle, the more effective it is at blocking out the sun. Some of these very particles are dirtying the solar panels on the Indian Institute of Technology rooftop.
Michael Bergin of Duke University's civil and environmental engineering department, the study's lead author, says tiny particulate pollution can either absorb the sun's radiation or scatter the sunlight, diffusing the light that hits solar panels. He's created a model to measure that loss — which is substantial.
"We came up with between 17 percent to 25 percent reductions in solar energy production in India and China," he says, "and we believe that the effects might be a little higher since the model we use tends to under-predict the effects."
Unaccounted for are the effects of things like burning trash, a widespread practice in India. As for deposits on solar panels, Bergin and his Indian team monitored accumulations at the Indian Institute of Technology in Gandhinagar, in the state of Gujarat — and arrived at eye-popping results.
"After we scraped the particles off, we would watch the solar energy production typically double," he says. "So in three to four weeks in northern India, often the solar energy production — if you weren't to clean these panels — decreases by a factor of two. So that's really huge."
Improving air quality would vastly improve the production of solar energy. It would, says Bergin, "have huge health benefits. So I think this is just another reason to try to clean the air."
In the face of skepticism, the government has pledged to achieve 100 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2022, five times its previous target and a goal considered extremely ambitious. (In 2014, the entire world had 181 gigawatts of solar capacity.)
Agricultural opportunities
Hundreds of miles north of Delhi, in the state of Uttarakhand, the air is clean. And here, changing climate conditions can seem more like an opportunity to exploit than a looming threat to fear.
Along the hairpin turns of the Himalayas, brightly colored houses appear as though they're painted on the sheer cliffs, and join the steppes as they slip into the Ganges. Roaring rivers are swollen by the summer monsoons.
But the rivers don't feed mountain agriculture — it's too difficult to pipe water up. The villages are rain- and snow-fed.
But the villagers report that less snow is actually falling, a decline they began to notice in the 1980s.
Suruchi Bhadwal leads an experiment designed to help farmers in high altitudes capitalize on the milder conditions brought about by a decrease in snowfall.
Her group, the New Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute, studies the impact of climate change on agriculture in the region. We head to a village where farmers were persuaded to make the most of their less snow-filled winters by cultivating land that used to lie fallow during the cold months.
"So now, they benefit because they are taking a crop out of it," says Bhadwal. "And it gives them more in their homes and more to sell. It was a total win-win for them."
In the village of Huddu, its ancient terraces are indeed sprouting a new crop — organic potatoes. They're being cultivated alongside traditional crops.
On a rocky terrace, women are planting grasses used for fodder. Watching them is Basanti Devi, perched crossed-legged on a boulder, her face weather-beaten. She recalls 35 years ago getting five feet of snow. Calculating how much snow there is nowadays, Basanti swipes an imaginary line just above her ankle — a matter of inches, she says.
Anand Kumar Sharma, in charge of the western and central Himalayas for the India's Meteorological Department, has doubts. Perception is one thing, he says, and "reality is something else." People confuse climate variability — short-term, natural fluctuations such as El Nino — with the phenomenon of climate change, Sharma says.
Sharma used to be the chief meteorologist in Uttarakhand and notes that there are just two stations collecting data over the vast region that is filled with micro-climates. He says it's not possible to know whether the reduced snowfall in one village is due to climate change.
An authoritative study released last year — whose authors include experts from India's meteorological department and Earth Sciences Ministry — appears to identify phenomena considered consistent with climate charge. It found that 23 glaciers in Uttarakhand had sharply retreated between 1960 and 2000.
It also states that between 1951 and 2000, in northern parts of India, "There are significant rising trends of extreme rainfall trends," which cause large-scale floods.
'Earlier, that land wouldn't give me much'
Adapting to their changing conditions, women are now harvesting the organic potatoes they planted in January. That's when villagers took advantage of their lengthened growing season for the first time.
Surji Devi's digging releases the scent of fresh earth into the air. At 60, she's nimble, rapidly separating the potatoes into piles. She pulls out several that are spoiled and crinkles her face into a frown.
Kailash Bhatt is a community organizer who helped mobilize 48 of the 100 families here to try their hand cultivating year-round. Is he happy with the yield?
"Actually, not so happy," Bhatt says. "But this is the first time."
Visiting agricultural experts tell the farmers that they grew the wrong varieties. Narayan Singh, a project director for TERI, explains their yield should be three times what they grew.
"It's not up to the mark," he says.
But with proper seeding, Singh says, next time it should improve.
The team then demonstrates best practices for planting — nine inches deep, 18 inches between rows. It's mostly the women of the village who have gathered to watch. The visitors tell them their village could someday add fruit trees to their terraces — excellent cash crops.
Their outdoor seminar takes place in the mountains, vertical carpets of summertime green. Stands of oak trees dot the landscape.
It's uncertain how having relatively little snowfall will affect the surrounding villages in the years to come. Will their rushing natural springs slow? Will oaks be overtaken by evergreens?
What's certain for Prem Singh Rana, a 39-year-old father of three, is that this village experiment holds promise. He managed to get his 200 lbs. of potatoes to market — there are only three or four cars in his village — and came home 2,000 rupees ($30) richer.
Rana is hopeful about the future. "Earlier, that land wouldn't give me much," he says. "But once I harvest the rest of the potatoes, I'll have another $30 to $60."
For Rana, that's significant. This back-breaking cultivation has added 15 percent to his annual income. His earnings may seem small, but they are the result of something big: Finding advantage in climate change.
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/08/20/543881831/as-indias-climate-changes-farmers-in-the-north-experiment-with-new-crops
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INTERVIEW - Proposed U.S. Aid Cuts Threaten 'Disaster' for World's Poor - Foundation Head
Aug 17, 2017 | Reuters
By Laurie Goering
Aid to help developing countries fight poverty, hunger, disease and climate change is likely to fall 50 to 70 percent under proposed U.S. budget cuts, a "disaster" for the world's poor, the president of The Rockefeller Foundation has warned.
Closing the expected gap through private or charitable spending looks unlikely, added Rajiv Shah, who ran the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2009 to 2015.
If the 15 largest U.S. foundations, including giants such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, combined their donations, the total would not match the cuts proposed just to USAID funding by President Donald Trump's administration, Shah said.
"This is not the kind of problem philanthropy can step in and solve - or should," he said. "These are public-sector responsibilities."
But philanthropists can play a key role in restoring badly eroded public faith in aid spending, by tracking results and proving investments work, he said.
They can also push money into ventures - such as off-grid solar power in India - that are hugely promising but sometimes too financially risky for governments or business at the start, the 44-year-old said.
"When Americans are told what our aid accomplishes - that we can provide a school lunch in the Nairobi slum of Kibera for 12 or 14 cents, that our investments have helped reduce deaths from malaria (in parts of Africa) by 50 percent - then they're very supportive and believe we should do more," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview in London.
In an era of "global populist retrenchment", foundations, investors and businesses "need to come together to solve global problems - not to replace governments, but to demonstrate that at-scale solutions can work", he said.
Shah, who grew up in Detroit and still refers to Americans as "folks", has had a foot in many of the worlds he hopes to unite to fill the aid gap.
The son of Indian immigrants, he earned medical and business degrees before working at the Gates Foundation, where he launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, an African-run effort to build food security, and a $5 billion finance facility to develop new vaccines.
He later worked briefly at the U.S. Department of Agriculture before being made head of USAID under former U.S. President Barack Obama.
Within 10 days of taking office, he led the U.S. effort to assist Haiti after its devastating 2010 earthquake, and later managed the response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Shah also ran the Obama administration's Power Africa programme, aimed at improving energy access for Africa's poor.
After leaving government in 2015, he helped found a private equity firm focused on emerging markets, and worked on issues around fragile states at Georgetown University in Washington.
SCIENCE, TECH, INNOVATION
At the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation, which he has led since March, he aims to bring together those diverse experiences to catalyse substantial improvements in health, food security and energy access, particularly in the poorest countries.
"We'll focus on efforts to bring science and tech and innovation to specific areas where we can improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people," said the head of The Rockefeller Foundation, which partners with the Thomson Reuters Foundation on its coverage of resilience.
Global accords reached in 2015, including the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals, show that "the world's two biggest common challenges are climate change and poverty" - and both require new coalitions of actors to "come together to do something about that at scale".
Good progress is already underway in places, Shah said. Ethiopia, for instance, is building huge hydropower and other clean energy capacity that is opening up development opportunities, and Kenya has trained 40,000 young people in computer science skills to help them win jobs, he said.
Even conflict-torn Afghanistan got 8 million children into school, including 3 million girls, between 2002 and 2012, and has seen the fastest reduction in maternal mortality - efforts backed by U.S. assistance, he said.
If the world wants to make real gains against extreme poverty and other key challenges, it must find ways to do it in some of the toughest places like Somalia and Yemen, he said.
"We have to figure out how to do our work better ... even more so in fragile settings, where corruption is a bigger risk," he told a discussion at the London-based Overseas Development Institute on Wednesday.
Philanthropists also need to make sure their money builds skills in the countries where they work, and backs broader government aims, rather than supporting piecemeal projects that are often less effective and leave chunks of the investment in the hands of consults and intermediaries, he said.
But he worries that President Trump's decision to include family members in his inner circle of advisors - and his pronouncements on a range of human rights issues - threaten U.S. moral standing to insist on good behaviour by other governments.
For the United States to waver in backing human rights and democracy, and in opposing corruption and nepotism - "the bedrock of values that animate American foreign policy" - is disastrous, Shah said.
"Our world needs leadership that comes together and says we can actually do things, solve problems, in a public-private manner, and do it in a way that leads to a safer world for our grandchildren," he said. "And that's not exactly what we're hearing from Washington."
https://af.reuters.com/article/africaTech/idAFL8N1L32ZG
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India Enters Global Smart-Meter Race to Fight Utility Losses
Aug 16, 2017 | Bloomberg
By Anindya Upadhyay
India is aiming to help its ailing power distribution companies by buying five million smart meters for two of its northern states in a global tender to be conducted later this month.
Energy Efficiency Services Ltd., the government agency responsible for running the country’s energy efficiency programs, will conduct the tender, Managing Director Saurabh Kumar said in a phone interview.
“This is a pilot project where four million smart meters will go to Uttar Pradesh and the rest to Haryana," Kumar said. If successful, the program could be adopted by a large number of states, he said.
For India, smart meters represent a possible gamechanger by handing power distribution companies the ability to address billing inefficiencies that have contributed to their losses and debt burden. Global investment in the technology is expected to hit $19 billion this year, according to research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
A smart-meter is an electronic device that records electricity consumption at short intervals and communicates it back to a utility for monitoring and billing. The devices are capable of two-way communication.
An information meeting ahead of the tender will be held on Aug. 20 in India’s capital of Delhi, while a second session will take place in London on Aug. 24.
Discom Debt
Most of India’s power distribution companies, or discoms, lose money on every unit of power sold due in part to theft, inadequate billing and selling below cost to poor and agricultural consumers. State-run distributors held combined debt of 4.3 trillion rupees ($67 billion) as of September 2015, the latest year of available data.
The debt levels limit their ability to adequately meet the power demands of existing customers or add new consumers in a country where millions of households don’t have electricity, but where power plants also remain underutilized.
The average technical and commercial losses at discoms in 24 states who’ve signed up under a reform plan currently stand at 21 percent, according to the government.
“We have committed to raising billing efficiency, which means monetizing the cost required to bill and also resolving inefficiencies like under or inadequate billing, thereby increasing revenues for the discom,” EESL’s Kumar said.
Last year, the Indian government said it’s aiming to outfit approximately 35 million customers with smart meters by the end of 2019.
“Considering that there are 1-2 million meters installed as of today, this would require an installation ramp-up faster than any country except China,” said James Sprinz, a Vancouver-based analyst with BNEF.
BNEF’s forecast is for India to have installed 15 million meters by 2020.
“If we were to see a number of large utilities announcing large procurements then this might alter the forecast but currently I think it looks reasonable,” Sprinz said.
In terms of market size, BNEF estimates a cost of $73 per installed meter, which is toward the lower end of global costs. Due to the low costs and limited installations, BNEF expects India’s market position to fall somewhere between third and sixth in Asia in the next 3 years to 4 years.
Attractive to Bidders
Smart-meter assets have become attractive to bidders in recent years ahead of a European Union goal to replace at least 80 percent of electricity meters with smart meters by 2020 in a drive to reduce emissions.
In July, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing agreed to acquire CVC Capital’s German smart-meter business Ista International GmbH for about 4.5 billion euros ($5.3 billion), including debt.
EESL is a joint venture between India’s Ministry of Power and state-backed companies in the power sector such as NTPC Ltd., Rural Electrification Corp., Power Grid Corp. of India Ltd., Power Finance Corp. and the Bureau of Energy Efficiency.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-16/india-enters-global-smart-meter-race-to-fight-utility-losses
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This is the World's Most Efficient Solar Panel
Aug 15, 2017 | World Economic Forum
By Tom Ward
In brief
Scientists have developed a solar cell that's more efficient than any other currently on the market by using innovative technology capable of capturing more parts of the solar spectrum. Innovation like this is crucial for the mitigating the effects of climate change.
The solar panel of the future
Scientists have developed a solar cell that is capable of converting direct sunlight into electricity with 44.5 percent efficiency — making it, potentially, the most efficient solar cell in the world. Current solar technology only converts electricity with a maximum efficiency of about 25 percent. The impressive cell works by stacking multiple layers of solar hardware into a single cell, each of which absorbs a different aspect of the solar spectrum.
This new tech is innovative compared to other cells in two regards. First, it uses transfer printing, which allowed the scientists to assemble the component parts with a high degree of precision. Second, it uses materials derived from gallium antimonide (GaSb) substrates, which are usually reserved for infrared lasers and photodetectors, in order to absorb every part of the direct sunlight.
Matthew Lumb, lead author on the study, stated that “our new device is able to unlock the energy stored in the long-wavelength photons, which are lost in conventional solar cells, and therefore provides a pathway to realizing the ultimate multi-junction solar cell.”
The solar revolution
As with any piece of energy converting technology, in order to maximize the amount of energy produced, one can either increase the quantity of converters, or improve the efficiency of the converters themselves. If this technology is scaled up, solar panels would require roughly half the space to produce the same amount of energy as the systems in place today due to their greater efficiency.
Although producing the initial was expensive, this experiment — and others like it — are crucial to show the upper limits of what is possible in solar technology. It has established a precedent, and the space in the market for another individual to make the cell cost effective.
Solar power already accounts for an increasing amount of energy produced worldwide, and it is becoming ever cheaper. Therefore, it is important to continue to find ways that make solar energy more and more effective so that it can surpass fossil-fuel based energy and become a green energy source capable of helping our planet (and us) to survive the harm we have caused it.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/this-is-the-most-efficient-solar-panel-ever-made?utm_content=buffer1fdee&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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