Solar, the new Oil

I got up this morning with an inspiring article by Mohan Murti in Business about how "Solar could be our new Oil" in the coming decades. He has drawn an anology with how Germany has transformed their Energy portfolio with several Solar and Wind installations.

It is just common sense to think that, for a developing country like India, Solar Thermal power plants should be the way forward. I have followed a few initiatives taken up in Thar Desert to set up a Solar Thermal power plant but they never gone beyond the drawing board.. Is it the huge upfront cost, or is it the notorious government support that stopped these projects, God only knows..

We all think of Solar power a few panels on Street lights, traffic lights or some remote off-grid sites or the poorly maintained and installed Solar heaters in thousands of roofs we see these days in Bangalore..

To make Solar power a common place thing, it is not enough to just (poorly!!) install a Solar heater on your roof and wait for dust to accumulate, but we must go head start into Solar thermal power plants in a large scale.. For which our Renewable energy ministry should provide whole-hearted support and bring in experienced personnel from Germany or Australia or Israel to share the technical know-how and slowly build knowledge base within the Indian group that supports..

More emphasis need to be given in the myriads of Engineering colleges to offer courses in Energy management with special emphasis to Solar Thermal power.. Then we would have aquired both human, capital resources to build multi-thousand-megawatt power plants and feed the energy appetite of growing India.

To read that the common man in New Delhi is going through 12 hours of powercut when we have a such reservoir of solar power in Delhi itslef or in Rajasthan is an irony..