The facility in Kamuthi, Tamil Nadu, has a capacity of 648 MW and covers an area of 10 sq km. This makes it the largest solar power plant at a single location, taking the title from the Topaz Solar Farm in California, which has a capacity of 550 MW. The solar plant, built in an impressive eight months and funded by the Adani Group, is cleaned every day by a robotic system, charged by its own solar panels.
The project is comprised of 2.5 million individual solar modules, and cost $679m to build. The new plant has helped nudge India's total installed solar capacity across the 10 GW mark.
India’s raft of ambitious plans and policies to ramp up national solar development have been generating plenty of headlines over the past few months, and new data has suggested tthe best-case scenario for India’s solar sector could boost the sub-continent’s PV capacity by more than 140GW over the next decade
In a report by Tata Power Solar and cleantech experts Bridge to India, analysts argue that India’s solar potential is huge enough to revolutionise the nation’s energy mix, as long as decision-makers followed the best possible solar roadmap.
The report, How should India drive its solar transformation? Beehives or Elephants, compares four different scenarios, each with a different solar focus – residential rooftops (solar bees); large rooftops (solar pigeons); utility-scale (solar horses); and ultra-mega projects (solar elephants) – evaluating their potential speed of deployment, implementation challenges and job creation potential.
“The realizable potential for solar power generation in India is between 110GW to 145GW across (all four) different types of systems,” said Bridge to India founder and director Tobias Engelmeier. “The four scenarios together could easily create over 675,000 solar jobs in India in the next 10 years.
The Indian government has announced plans to develop a 4GW solar project, near Sambhar lake in Rajasthan.
According to the details of an official release, India’s Department of Heavy Industry (DHI) has initiated the process of setting up the Sambhar Ultra Mega Green Solar Power Project in the 23,000 acre area of Sambhar Salts Limited, a subsidiary of the government-run Hindustan Salts Limited (HSL) in Rajasthan.
The first phase of the project, which will be 1GW, is likely to be commissioned in three years (by the end of 2016), the release said, and is expected to be implemented through a JV company to be formed with equity from BHEL, Solar Energy Corporation of India, Power Grid Corporation, Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam and Rajasthan Electronics and Instruments Ltd.
The remaining capacity would be implemented through a variety of models, depending on the outcome of the first phase of project.
If fully completed, the 4GW project would produce 6000 million kWh per year to the distribution companies of various states through India’s national grid.
There has been no indication yet of whether the project would use solar PV or concentrated solar power technology.
Wind power is now cost competitive with new coal-fired generation in India, according to a report from HSBC [pdf]. Falling costs are just one reason for the increased interest in wind. For the first time, India has identified water as a scare natural resource in its most recent five-year plan. Nearly 90 percent of India’s industrial water demand comes from thermal power plants, according to the HSBC report.
The appeal of some renewables, such as wind and solar photovoltaic, is that they use far less water than coal, nuclear, or natural gas power plants. Across the globe, water stress is growing within the energy industry and power plants have to partially shut down when there isn’t enough water for cooling. In India, water shortages just before monsoon season in 2012 forced hydro generation and thermal power plants to partially close.
India needs all the power it can get. Last July, a sweeping power outage left about 700 million people without power. Outages are a daily occurrence in India, although usually not at that scale, because of a dearth of generation coupled with an outdated grid. The Central Electricity Authority estimates India has a peak deficit of 12 gigawatts.
The latest five-year plan calls for a doubling of renewable energy from the previous plan, including 15 gigawatts of wind, 10 gigawatts of solar, 2 gigawatts of small hydro and nearly 3 gigawatts of biomass. Individual Indian states have also instituted solar and wind installation targets.
India's energy crisis cascaded over half the country on Tuesday when three of its regional grids collapsed, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied electricity for several hours in, by far, the world's biggest blackout. ...
The new power failure affected 620 million people across 20 of India's 28 states - about double the population of the United States. The blackout was unusual in its reach, stretching from the border with Myanmar in the northeast to the Pakistani border about 3000 kilometres away. Its impact, however, was softened by Indians' familiarity with frequent blackouts and the widespread use of backup generators for major businesses and key facilities such as hospitals and airports. ...
Tuesday's blackout eclipsed Monday's in India, which covered territory including 370 million people. The third largest blackout affected 100 million people in Indonesia in 2005, according to reports by The Associated Press.
India's demand for electricity has soared along with its economy in recent years, but utilities have been unable to meet the growing needs. India's Central Electricity Authority reported power deficits of more than 8 per cent in recent months.
In addition, vast amounts of power are pirated through unauthorized wiring that taps into the electrical system.
The power deficit was worsened by a weak monsoon that lowered hydroelectric generation and kept temperatures higher, further increasing electricity usage as people seek to cool off.
The Gujarat government is all set to develop India’s first tidal energy plant. The state government has approved Rs 25 crore for setting up the 50 MW plant at the Gulf of Kutch. It will produce energy from the ocean tides.
The state government signed a MoU with Atlantis Resource Corporation last year to develop the plant.
According to an estimate, India has a potential of 8,000 MW of tidal energy
“The proposal was approved in this year’s budget session,” says Rajkumar Raisinghani, senior executive with Gujarat Power Corporation Limited (GPCL).
Atlantis Resource Corporation is a UK-based developer of tidal current turbines. “The equipment has been imported and work will start anytime soon. We are awaiting Coastal Regulation Zone clearance from Ministry of Environment and Forests, which is expected soon,” adds Raisinghani.
According to the GPCL officials, if this 50 MW plant is successfully commissioned, its capacity will be increased to 200 MW. As per a study conducted by Atlantis Resource Corporation and the state government two years ago, the Gulf of Kutch has a total potential of 300 MW. The biggest operating tidal station in the world, La Rance in France, generates 240 MW.
According to the estimates of the Indian government, the country has a potential of 8,000 MW of tidal energy. This includes about 7,000 MW in the Gulf of Cambay in Gujarat, 1,200 MW in the Gulf of Kutch and 100 MW in the Gangetic delta in the Sunderbans region of West Bengal.
As the world’s second-most populous country and a growing global power, India would do well to think about its energy future, and it seems to be doing just that – according to a report by Bridge to India, the country is aiming to install 33.4 GW of solar power nationwide. That’s much more than the 20 GW previously targeted by India’s National Solar Mission.
To put that in perspective, China, the world’s largest energy consumer, is aiming to have a capacity of 50 GW by 2020. This is to ease its dependency on nuclear energy in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster and also to meet the goal of having 15% of all energy come from renewable resources by the end of the decade. Meanwhile the Desertec Project is planned to generate 100GW of solar energy which is estimated to power most of Europe.
India is currently aiming to have 14.15 GW of solar capacity by 2018, by which time putting solar energy onto the national grid will be much more established and easier. It would also make the market more competitive, not to mention decreasing the country’s emissions.
The Bridge to India report does state that there isn’t currently enough government support for small or off-grid solar power applications. This is not surprising considering how dependent India is on fossil fuels and the general reluctance of developed countries to fully embrace the benefits of alternative energy. However, industry insiders believe that with the increased production of PV cells globally and the possibility of cheap imports from China, solar costs will drop by 40% in the next three years.
The Australian has a look at an Indian corporation's plan to vertically integrate power consumption starting from Queensland's coal fields - From pit to port: India's $10bn coal export plan. When I read stories like this I tend to think averting serious global warming problems really isn't going to be easy...
INDIAN energy giant Adani Enterprises has moved foreign investment in Australia to a new level, with a $10 billion scheme to control every stage of its booming coal export business from mine to port.
In his first major interview, the chief executive of Adani's Australian operations, Jignesh Derasari, declared the company wanted to control "whatever component the coal touches", including a $3bn railway network to haul coal from the emergent Galilee Basin in central Queensland to two ports, one of which it purchased this year and the other which it will build at Dudgeon Point near Mackay.
From these outlets, Adani-owned bulk carriers would ship the coal to India to supply a chain of seven power stations operated by the company.
The scheme is one of the most ambitious vertically integrated resource developments ever proposed in Australia and comes after the federal government rejected bids by Chinese concerns to set up mine-to-port iron ore operations in Western Australia. It will make Adani India's largest single investor in this country.
The massive mine is being developed in the Galilee Basin about 400km inland of Mackay, Australia's new coal frontier, where Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting and Clive Palmer's Waratah Holdings are also pursuing major developments.
Hancock Prospecting is in negotiations with Indian company GVK to sell its holdings in the area for $2bn, while Waratah has a contract to sell 30 million tonnes of coal to China over the next 20 years.
Mr Derasari's candid admission that Adani wants to control the production chain at every level from the Galilee Basin adds another dimension to the intensifying row between coal and coal-seam gas developers and farmers over land access. NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell bought into this yesterday, saying he respected "the fact that there are parts of our state which should and always will be kept as agriculture".
Mr Derasari told The Weekend Australian that vertigal integration was central to the company's development plan in the Galilee. "Whatever component the coal touches, we would like to be in control of that," he said. "So that means the mine, the rail, the port where the coal is transported out of, the ship that the coal sits on until it gets to the port in India. Then it goes on a conveyer belt to the power station."
With the proposed commissioning of a 50-Mw tidal power project off the coast of Gujarat in 2013, India is ready to place its first “seamark” that will be a first for Asia as well.
London-based marine energy developer Atlantis Resources Corporation, along with Gujarat Power Corporation Ltd, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Gujarat government to start this project.
The cost for the plant is expected to be in the vicinity of Rs 750 crore. This plant is also is expected to be scaled up to 250 Mw.
Timothy Cornelius, CEO, Atlantis Resources Corporation, said with just about 2 giga watt of tidal power installations in the world today, this is a completely new and uncharted power sources with immense potential. “Tidal power today is what wind energy was 10 years back,” he said.
Due to the high investment in setting up the project, a typical tidal power project is expected to break even between 8 and 12 years after commissioning. Despite the long gestation period to make it commercially viable, tidal power has unparalleled environmental advantages.
“Tidal current power uses turbines to harness the energy contained in the flow of ocean tides. It is unique as like tidal movements, power output is highly predictable and sustainable with zero visual impact and the turbines are completely submerged. Tidal power is like putting a wind turbine subsea and the turbine rotors rotate slowly, causing very little environmental impact to marine flora and fauna,” said Cornelius.
The power offtaker would be Gujarat Power Corporation. The final cost of power per unit will be determined at the completion of front-end engineering and design (FEED) phase, but was expected to be competitive when compared to the large solar power projects planned for development in Gujarat, the company said.
The project is currently owned by Atlantis and GPCL and project equity participants will be sought at the completion of FEED phase.
Late last year, Atlantis became the turbine supplier to the largest planned marine power project in the world, MeyGen, a 378-Mw tidal power project in the Pentland Firth in Northern Scotland.
Current estimates suggest 15 per cent of the world’s power demands can be met by tidal current power sources, while the estimates for India are currently around 5 per cent of its annual demand for power.
Atlantis Resources Corp., an ocean- current turbine maker backed by Morgan Stanley, plans to expand in China, India and South Korea after winning a bid in the U.K. to build the world’s largest tidal-power project.
Atlantis Resources may start building a 50 megawatt tidal farm by 2012 in Gujarat, a western Indian state, and conduct commercial-scale trials in South Korea, Timothy Cornelius, the chief executive officer, said an interview today.
“China’s the next big market for tidal energy,” Cornelius, 34, said in Singapore at the Clean Energy conference. “It has the most natural tidal resources in the world and can be home to more than 1,000 megawatts of tidal energy.”
Global production of electricity harnessing the ocean waves may climb ten-fold to as much as 300 megawatts in the next couple of years, said Cornelius, a former submersible engineer who splits his time between Singapore and London. The potential to produce marine power economically is about 24,000 megawatts, he said. It costs 2.5 million pounds ($4.01 million) per megawatt for a minimum 200 megawatt-tidal project, he said.
The Climate Spectator has a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance on Indian solar power projects - India's solar advantage.
The first set of projects under India's ambitious National Solar Mission went under the hammer last week. Initial trends show that the capacity bid is at least three times more than the 620MW that is to be awarded, though the final numbers could show a much higher multiple.
There are, however, no alarm bells going off in the Indian finance ministry. The government has what can be referred to as a late-mover advantage, which has allowed it to avoid the excesses seen in some European countries.
There are a few things which stand out in the auction of India's first batch of solar projects, to be set up by 2013, and involving an investment of over $US2 billion.
For starters, the auction is primarily about large solar thermal. Bids for 470MW of capacity have been invited. This is higher than the total commissioned capacity of 437MW of solar thermal in Spain, the world leader, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance data.
On the PV side, there are just 150MW of capacity on offer in India's first round through 30 projects of 5MW each to be set up by 2013. That is a small blip in the capacity being added globally. Bloomberg New Energy Finance has projected a PV capacity addition of 14GW-to-19GW in 2010. Up to 1.2GW of new installations are expected in the Czech Republic alone this year. Germany has installed over 3GW of PV in the first half of 2010.
Secondly, there is an element of market price discovery built into the process. The attractive feed-in tariffs will now cease to matter since the 400-odd applicants will have to offer the largest discounts to get selected, a formula that India has emulated from other countries which have married feed-in tariffs with reverse bidding.
Thirdly, the government has limited its own, and the consumer's, bill for solar power by ensuring initial support for pre-defined solar capacity instead of the anyone-past-the-post kind of a scheme which has led to runaway growth of solar power in parts of Europe.
Fourthly, India has mandated the use of domestically made PV modules in this phase and domestically made cells and modules in the next phase. For solar thermal projects, the rules mandate a 30 per cent local content. Both moves reflect the worrying trend of increasing protectionism in the clean energy sector.
A desalination plant which begins operating in Madras on Saturday will provide some of the cheapest drinking water in India, backers say. They say that the plant will supply 1,000 litres of drinking water for just over $1 and could well be a "template" for other coastal Indian cities.
The company behind the plant says that it is the biggest in South Asia. It will provide 100 million litres of water a day to the city by filtering sea water under high pressure.
In comparison, the government-run water board supplies about 650 million litres of water to the city's seven million residents.
"We are using the advanced reverse osmosis technology. We are purifying the water by filtering it under high pressure. Unlike other desalination plants we are not boiling the water and as a result we are saving a lot of energy," Natarajan Ganesan, Joint General Manager of the Chennai Water Desalination company told the BBC.
Mr Ganesan said that because the plant used "energy recovering technology", electricity consumption was reduced - making water produced there arguably the most competitively priced in India. "It can be competitive even when compared to supplying water from natural sources like lakes. One has to spend lot of money on transport water from lakes," he said.
The plant will process 237 million litres of sea water per day. An initial treatment will remove solids present in the water, before it is passed through a membrane under high pressure.
The plant - which cost $140m - is the joint venture between an Indian company IVRCL and Befessa of Spain. It is built under the "deboot" system - design, build, own, operate and transfer.
India is hurting for water. With rapidly growing populations of people and a rising middle class that is mimicking the wasteful water consumption habits well known here in the United States, coupled with poor water management practices, India is set to be one of the first parts of the world hit by a major water crisis. Still, does that mean shipping water from Alaska all the way to India is a smart solution? One Texas-based water supply management company, S2C Global Systems, thinks it is -- at least, it's smart for their bottom line, if not for the environment. They're all lined up to ship billions of gallons of water annually from an Alaskan city to India, and other parts of Asia and the Middle East.
Circle of Blue brings our attention to a press release on the company's website.
Sitka, Alaska will sell water from its Blue Lake Reservoir for a penny a gallon to Alaska Resource Management, a company formed by S2C and True Alaska Bottling, will export as much as 2.9 billion gallons each year, providing the city with as much as $26 million annually. It could earn as much as $90 million annually if it can sell off the rest of its maximum water right of 9 billion gallons.
According to Circle of Blue, "This will be the world's first large-volume exports of water via tanker: companies have tried unsuccessfully for more than two decades to break open the bulk water export market. Past attempts have been thwarted by daunting logistics, concerns about natural resource sovereignty and commodification as well as the availability of cheaper local sources."
Fresh water is set to be the next "big oil" of the world, with supplies in some areas growing exceedingly tight. Technologies from smart metering to irrigation management to purification all seem to be slower to reach areas like India than tankers of exported water. However, while businesses are dashing to find a profit in water exportation, water management will need to become far more popular globally if we're to avoid a worldwide water shortage.
S2C is set to start shipping water within eight months, using tankers that have a "Ozonating" system onboard to keep the water clean. The shipping of the water alone sounds incredibly energy intensive.
Julia Whitty has written a smart, nuanced cover story on population for Mother Jones. She addresses the important issues, she connects the dots, she knows her stuff. But I have a bone to pick.
About half of the article explores the wide-ranging set of issues associated with global population growth and (over)consumption; the other half focuses on particular problems and signs of progress in India. And the whole thing is illustrated with more than a dozen richly colored photographs of poor or middle-class Indians.
Whitty makes clear that population growth in the developing world is not the main problem, that the high-consuming lifestyles of the rich are the big driver of environmental degradation:
[E]ven though India has a much larger population and a higher rate of population growth than the U.S., its overall carbon legacy is vastly reduced, due to its population's drastically lower levels of consumption combined with shorter lifespans ... At current rates, an American child has 55 times the carbon legacy of a child born to a family in India.
And I can see why Whitty would want to report on India: She has family roots in Kolkata, and she weaves her grandmother's story into her larger narrative.
But I think both she and Mother Jones erred in making India the focus of this particular piece. A person casually browsing through the magazine is likely to come away with one impression: population problem = India. Even people who read every word of Whitty's article will be left thinking about the relationship between population pressures and India.
Optics matter. If Indians aren't the main offenders, why put them in the spotlight? Why not illustrate an article about the global population problem with photos of New York City's traffic-choked streets, or London's jam-packed Tube system, or a crowded mega-mall in Alberta, or Phoenix's bleak sprawl?
Whitty's words tell a true story; the framing of her article hints at a false one.
Longtime population scholar and activist Paul Ehrlich did the same thing when he began writing about these issues. Ehrlich, who has long been concerned about population increase among all peoples, wrote in the first chapter of his monumental 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb that he first became viscerally aware of the population problem during a late-night taxi ride through Delhi:
The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping, people visiting, arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved through the mob, hand horn squealing, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us [Ehrlich plus his wife and daughter] were, frankly, frightened. ... Since that night I've known the feel of overpopulation.
As demographer Jack Caldwell wrote later, Ehrlich "did not see population explosion, for Delhi's birth rate is relatively slow. He probably saw fewer people than one would see with pleasure in New York, London or Paris at Christmas or in the peak hour. What he did see were poor non-Europeans." (Quoted from The Coming Population Crash by Fred Pearce.)
More than 40 years later, Whitty begins her article with a strikingly similar (though less melodramatically rendered) scene -- a late-night taxi ride through crowded streets, this time in Kolkata instead of Delhi.
UPI reports that Indian efforts to produce biofuel from Jatropha aren't working out as well as hoped - Indian biofuel efforts falter.
Jatropha has long been promoted as a promising biofuel substitute to ease the global energy crisis. One hectare is capable of yielding 390-456 gallons of jatropha oil, equivalent to 433.7 gallons of diesel. ...
Jatropha's growing conditions proved to be more complex than originally thought. Jatropha requires close care. Chhattisgarh Renewable Energy Development Agency analyst Preeti Kaur noted that while initially specialists assumed that jatropha could flourish on wasteland, without irrigation it in fact requires moderate irrigation. As a result, nationwide investments in jatropha of more than $5 billion are at risk.
Kaur added, "The plans have almost failed and our investments are stuck due to the poor quality of jatropha seeds. Other than this, small land holdings are a major reason for the failure of jatropha plantations."
There are many ways to describe Dantewara. It's an oxymoron. It's a border town smack in the heart of India. It's the epicentre of a war. It's an upside down, inside out town.
In Dantewara the police wear plain clothes and the rebels wear uniforms. The jail-superintendent is in jail. The prisoners are free (300 of them escaped from the old town jail two years ago). Women who have been raped are in police custody. The rapists give speeches in the bazaar.
Across the Indravati river, in the area controlled by the Maoists, is the place the police call 'Pakistan'. There the villages are empty, but the forest is full of people. Children who ought to be in school run wild. In the lovely forest villages, the concrete school buildings have either been blown up and lie in a heap, or they're full of policemen. The deadly war that's unfolding in the jungle is a war that the government of India is both proud and shy of. Operation Green Hunt has been proclaimed as well as denied. P. Chidambaram, India's home minister (and CEO of the war) says it does not exist, that it's a media creation. And yet substantial funds have been allocated to it and tens of thousands of troops are being mobilised. Though the theatre of war is in the jungles of Central India, it will have serious consequences for us all.
If ghosts are the lingering spirits of someone, or something that has ceased to exist, then perhaps the National Mineral Development Corporation's new four-lane highway crashing through the forest is the opposite of a ghost. Perhaps it is the harbinger of what is still to come.
The antagonists in the forest are disparate and unequal in almost every way. On one side is a massive paramilitary force armed with the money, the firepower, the media, and the hubris of an emerging superpower. On the other, ordinary villagers armed with traditional weapons, backed by a superbly organised, hugely motivated Maoist guerilla fighting force with an extraordinary and violent history of armed rebellion. The Maoists and the paramilitary are old adversaries and have fought older avatars of each other several times before: Telengana in the 1950s, West Bengal, Bihar, Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh in the late 60s and 70s, and then again in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra from the 80s all the way through to the present. They are familiar with each other's tactics, and have studied each other's combat manuals closely. Each time, it seemed as though the Maoists (or their previous avatars) had been not just defeated, but literally, physically exterminated. Each time, they have re-emerged, more organised, more determined and more influential than ever. Today once again the insurrection has spread through the mineral-rich forests of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal— homeland to millions of India's tribal people, dreamland to the corporate world.
It's easier on the liberal conscience to believe that the war in the forests is a war between the government of India and the Maoists, who call elections a sham, parliament a pigsty and who have openly declared their intention to overthrow the Indian state. It's convenient to forget that tribal people in Central India have a history of resistance that pre-dates Mao by centuries. (That's a truism of course. If they didn't, they wouldn't exist.) The Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the Santhals, the Mundas and the Gonds have all rebelled several times – against the British, against zamindars and against moneylenders. The rebellions were cruelly crushed, many thousands killed, but the people were never conquered. Even after independence, tribal people were at the heart of the first uprising that could be described as Maoist, in Naxalbari village in West Bengal (where the word Naxalite – now used interchangeably with "Maoist" – originates). Since then Naxalite politics has been inextricably entwined with tribal uprisings, which says as much about the tribals as it does about Naxalites.
This legacy of rebellion has left behind a furious people who have been deliberately isolated and marginalised by the Indian government. The Indian constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The constitution ratified colonial policy and made the state custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce. It criminalised a whole way of life. In exchange for the right to vote, it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity.
Having dispossessed them and pushed them into a downward spiral of indigence, in a cruel sleight of hand the government began to use their own penury against them. Each time it needed to displace a large population – for dams, irrigation projects, mines – it talked of "bringing tribals into the mainstream" or of giving them "the fruits of modern development". Of the tens of millions of internally displaced people (more than 30 million by big dams alone) – refugees of India's "progress" – the great majority are tribal people. When the government begins to talk of tribal welfare, it's time to worry. ...
When a country that calls itself a democracy openly declares war within its borders, what does that war look like? Does the resistance stand a chance? Should it? Who are the Maoists? Are they just violent nihilists foisting an outdated ideology on tribal people, goading them into a hopeless insurrection? What lessons have they learned from their past experience? Is armed struggle intrinsically undemocratic? Is the Sandwich Theory – of "ordinary" tribals being caught in the crossfire between the state and the Maoists – an accurate one? Are "Maoists" and "tribals" two entirely discrete categories, as is being made out? Do their interests converge? Have they learned anything from each other? Have they changed each other?
The day before I left, my mother called sounding sleepy. "I've been thinking," she said, with a mother's weird instinct. "What this country needs is revolution."
An article on the internet says that Israel's Mossad is training 30 high-ranking Indian police officers in the techniques of targeted assassinations, to render the Maoist organisation "headless". There's talk in the press about the new hardware that has been bought from Israel: laser range finders, thermal imaging equipment and the unmanned drones so popular with the US army. Perfect weapons to use against the poor.
India, with $254 billion of foreign-exchange reserves, may create a sovereign wealth fund to help state companies compete for overseas energy assets with China, a government official said.
The oil ministry has formally asked the finance ministry to set up a fund using a part of the reserves, the official said, declining to be identified because a decision hasn’t been reached. The size of the fund is yet to be determined, he said. ...
China, with $2.4 trillion of reserves and a $300 billion sovereign fund, has outpaced India in the global quest for resources to feed the world’s fastest-growing major economies. Chinese companies spent a record $32 billion last year buying oil, coal and metals assets abroad, while a $2.1 billion investment by ONGC was India’s sole energy acquisition.
The New Statesman has a slightly harsh review of James Cameron's "Avatar" (though not as harsh as John Pilger's) and a similar story evolving in India (minus the cool floating mountains) - Return of the natives.
James Cameron's Avatar tells the story of a disabled ex-marine, sent from earth to infiltrate a race of blue-skinned aboriginal people on a distant planet and persuade them to let his employer mine their homeland for natural resources. Through a complex biological manipulation, the hero's mind gains control of his "avatar", in the body of a young aborigine.
These aborigines are deeply spiritual and live in harmony with nature (they can plug a cable that sticks out of their body into horses and trees to communicate with them). Predictably, the marine falls in love with a beautiful aboriginal princess and joins the aborigines in battle, helping them to throw out the human invaders and saving their planet. At the film's end, the hero transposes his soul from his damaged human body to his aboriginal avatar, thus becoming one of them.
Given the 3-D hyperreality of the film, with its combination of real actors and animated digital corrections, Avatar should be compared to films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) or The Matrix (1999). In each, the hero is caught between our ordinary reality and an imagined universe - of cartoons in Roger Rabbit, of digital reality in The Matrix, or of the digitally enhanced everyday reality of the planet in Avatar. What one should thus bear in mind is that, although Avatar's narrative is supposed to take place in one and the same "real" reality, we are dealing - at the level of the underlying symbolic economy - with two realities: the ordinary world of imperialist colonialism on the one hand, and a fantasy world, populated by aborigines who live in an incestuous link with nature, on the other. (The latter should not be confused with the miserable reality of actual exploited peoples.) The end of the film should be read as the hero fully migrating from reality into the fantasy world - as if, in The Matrix, Neo were to decide to immerse himself again fully in the matrix.
...Avatar's fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the "military-industrial complex" of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of abeautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man's fantasy.
At the same time as Avatar is making money all around the world (it generated $1bn after less than three weeks of release), something that strangely resembles its plot is taking place. The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa, inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded...
A small British-based tidal energy company has won a landmark contract to attempt to harness the power of the sea around India for the first time. Atlantis Resources has forged a deal with the western state of Gujarat, under which the privately owned company will establish the feasibility of developing tidal power projects capable of generating more than 100 megawatts of power — enough to supply about 40,000 households.
Of particular interest are the Gulf of Kutch and the Gulf of Khambhat in the Arabian Sea: two sites renowned for extreme daily tides. The project could lead to hundreds of millions of pounds worth of investment in tidal energy if the results of the study are positive.
India has more than 4,500 miles of coastline and is scrambling to tackle a gaping power deficit but has yet to establish a single tidal power project. The move to explore the untapped resource comes ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, an event where India will strive to demonstrate that it isdoing its utmost to limit emissions while refusing to cap economic growth.
India, which imports 70 per cent of its oil and relies on modest coal reserves to generate most of its electricity, is on course to become the third-largest user of energy by 2030, behind the US and China.
Atlantis’s backers include Morgan Stanley and Statkraft, the Norweigan state utility. The company, which is run by Tim Cornelius, an Australian former pilot of manned submersibles, is also hoping to establish a £400 million project to build one of the world’s biggest tidal power plants in the Pentland Firth, off the Scottish coast.
SHARES in Perth-based tiddler Eden Energy rocketed more than 250 per cent under heavy trade this morning after announcing a non-binding deal with Indian giant Indian Oil Corporation.
Under a term sheet signed in India this week, the Delhi-based company will farm-in to the development of a new pyrolysis technology jointly conceived by Eden and the University of Queensland.
Eden said the research will focus on the “commercial potential of a form of carbon believed to be the strongest structural material known to man”. ...
Under the arrangement, Eden will purchase the University of Queensland’s 50 per cent stake in the patents and intellectual property developed by the project in exchange for shares in the energy company.
Eden will then transfer this interest to India Oil after it has up scaled the technology to a pilot plant stage.
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