<div>The world is getting hotter but we still have not figured out how to implement solar energy in our cities and use it for industry. However, there are some who have spent over forty years turning this dream into reality.<strong> Dr Charles Gay, President of Applied Solar</strong> at Applied Materials, a $8.7-billion semi-conductor company, grew up poor in a farm in California where they had to burn wood to cook. At school, he figured out the world has to be independent of oil and has spent his lifetime on solar research. Solar apart, he has participated in civil rights movements for black people in the early sixties. He believes India can leapfrog a generation on solar which could be set up on home rooftop and can then supply power to the grid. This movement he feels can create a future of cities. However, he warns there there are too many stakeholders when it comes to commercialising solar power and says they should get together to make solar a reality.<br /><br /> Even in countries like the USA where the total installed capacity is 1050.9 GW, less than 1 per cent of the power requirements come from solar. India has a total electricity generation capacity of 211,500 MW, of which less than 1 per cent is solar power. Gay talked to<strong> BW|Businessworld's Vishal Krishna</strong> about how Applied solar manufacturing cells and wafers for solar panels fit right in to markets like India, which plans to have 20 GW solar power by 2020. <br /><br /><em>Excerpts of the interview:<br /></em> <br /><strong>Where do we begin, the world is thinking solar, but can it be a viable proposition?</strong><br />There are jobs (created) to make raw materials, jobs to make the equipment, jobs to make the solar panels, jobs to install the solar panels, jobs for the electronics and the maintenance. It’s a win-win situation. For the environment, it’s a good clean energy source, for global economies it means creation of jobs. It is an exciting time for solar because of this convergence of recognition of the importance of sustainable climate considerations along with economic competitiveness. There are basically three application segments – a home rooftop, a commercial building rooftop, and power plants. So, in the US, many of the power plants range in size from 200 to 700 megawatts. A coal burning power plant is usually 700 megawatts in size. In the US, some of the solar power plants that are being installed are the same in size. People usually meet their own energy need with their own solar panel on rooftops. <br /><br />There are examples of communities today in Davis, California -- which is near the state capital Sacramento -- of zero energy communities. These are communities that can generate the electricity that they need for their own corporate quality of life. Here in India, the commercial building application is a very good one. You know people work in offices in the daytime and they like to have air-conditioning or at least ventilation and fans, lighting, so there’s a perfect match between when the sun is shining and when people need the energy in a commercial building. So companies like Tata Power have very good business models for providing electricity through solar and they can provide the electricity at a price less than the grid; and of course make it reliable, so you have the electricity 24 hours a day or whenever you might need it in a very reliable way, which is very helpful.<br /><br /><strong>Are there companies in India that have created sound business models out of solar in India?</strong><br />Yes, there are quite a few companies like Moser Baer, ITC’s Wimco and the Yash Birla that have initiated various kinds of businesses that will facilitate solar power generation. This is a very interesting time in many ways. There’s a good parallel, I think, between the evolution of solar and the evolution of automobiles. Automobile industry, in the USA, had thousands of companies with different ideas which eventually consolidated to a few companies. <br /><br /><strong>Looking back, is something like that going to happen in solar?</strong><br />That was a very exciting time of innovation and creativity around manufacturing of automobiles, the creation of infrastructure and also the commissioning of manufacturing units for automobiles. As time passed, these thousands of companies narrowed down to a dozen or two companies globally. But they created lots of jobs, lots of manufacturing jobs and with the scale of cost coming down, many people could afford automobiles. Also, it was representative of autonomy, some independence in a way where people could choose where to go and when they wanted to go there. Imagine if you could do this with electricity, in a certain sense having your own electricity provides you to choose what you want to do with it and how well to use it. Yes India and China are becoming economically powerful and with the quality of life improving, a large fraction of the population are looking for self-reliance. So in many ways, kind of along the lines of Gandhiji’s message to all of us to be self-reliant, being able to provide for our needs. <br /><br />In India solar can actually create self-reliance in rural areas. Bringing electricity to individual homes, you can have a TV or radio or light, this gives young people an opportunity to learn. Here in Bangalore, I don’t know if you are familiar with a company called Selco. Harish Hande is a world recognised innovator for his business models for rural electrification, and he’s very creative. He’s done things like put solar on schools and when kids come to school he makes it possible for them to bring a small light that they can charge while they are in school and take back the lamp to study with at night. And I have for many years now, say for more than 15 years, have a foundation that I run called Greenstar which focuses on rural electrification. We go to villages and install solar-powered community centres. One of the first we did in India was a pilot programme in Hyderabad in 1997 and basically made it possible for village tailors to use solar to run, basically convert treadle sewing machines to electric sewing machines, with the solar panels. <br /><br /><strong>Is solar more of an experiment in rural regions?<br /></strong>Yes, a lot of this is small entrepreneurs who aren’t seeking self-recognition or promotion but who are really very creative in being able to use electricity effectively all the way from the rural village to your large urban power plants now. It is a lesson to learn from them as solar brings a good balance into the grid. Typically in a utility network system, 40 per cent of the capital would be in the coal burning power plant, 60 per cent is the wire cost, and if you can put power along the length of the wire, you don’t have to add more wire. You can use the existing infrastructure far more cost effectively. So innovations are possible depending on the goals of the state electricity board, for example, the relationship that entrepreneurs can create with government infrastructure. So this is a time of great innovation, a time of business innovation, a time of technology innovation that is coming together.<br /><br /><strong>What about the USA, where is solar heading?<br /></strong>The US has tremendous wind reserves that more or less go north to south from the middle of the country, so from Texas to North Dakota, say kind of like a wind valley for America, and in Texas a major project is under way that has an average price of electricity at 6 US cents a kilowatt hour, combines wind and solar. This 600 megawatts of wind and 400 megawatts of solar is being installed, and so in combination it’s a very good matching of the resource, and Texas is famous in the US as kind of a unique state, and very independent, and so they have their own utility wire system that can easily make good use of this hybrid of wind and solar to bring costs down even more. Policy is incredibly important especially for the smart grid for making information transparent. Knowing where’s the power needed, when is it needed and then you can use weather forecasting very effectively here to model how much you know if it’s going to be. You can gauge whether it is hot tomorrow and I need extra power, whether I can plan for it. Again we need to utilise the entire infrastructure more effectively, and there’s a very strong tie between weather and energy consumption for example. <br /><br />In the US, the government has created what is called the investment tax credit, different governments have different financial instruments that they made use of. So in the US the investment tax credit has made it possible for new business models to come and these companies are raising money. Recently there was a public offering of a company called Solar City. Similarly, there are home solar companies called SunRun, and Sungevity. These businesses will install solar on your roof and sell you electricity at a price less than the utility price for electricity in exchange for getting to use your roof. They connect to the grid, so in Europe and Japan there’s what’s called a feed-in-terra, this means if you put solar on your roof and you send the electricity into the grid and you are paid a fixed price for that energy guaranteed for 20 years. So it is important to maximise energy delivery and it is possible to work closely with banks to have access to finance and to be able to utilise the feed in terra basically as an investment. <br /><br /><strong>Will the next two decades be the time for solar energy?<br /></strong>Solar is low risk and low project risk as well, unlike traditional coal and gas plants. In electricity generation, usually there’s time to get a permit and time for construction costs before any cash flow happens. In solar, the time from defining a project to cash flow is extremely short, so on a cash flow basis solar is becoming far more prevalent because the risk of construction delays and unknown risks and questions whether this will work or not are reduced so much. The time to money is reduced so much that in Europe, which is a better example, the majority of the new power generation is solar. Increasingly in the US a large fraction of new generation is solar, coal burning power plants are near the end of their life in the US, which are well over 40 years old, and now many of them don’t meet the environmental control requirements, and are either being replaced with gas turbines or with solar.</div>
