Political Economy of Renewable Energy Deployment in India: Case Study of Karnataka

Over the past few years, India has paid considerable attention to the development of its Renewable Energy (RE) capacity. This can be attributed to the country's energy security concerns, necessity to provide reliable electricity to its citizens and the global need to mitigate climate change. India's ambitious targets project that by 2020, 10 per cent of its power shall come from renewable sources and by 2022 there will be 165 GW of RE capacity installed. Of this target capacity, there will be a 100 GW of installed solar capacity, 60 MW from wind and 5 MW from other sources such as small hydro and bioenergy (Vashishtha 2014). This implies that within the next five years, India has to undertake the mammoth task of almost doubling its RE contribution to the energy mix from the current 6 per cent. The solar sector faces the largest challenge of scaling up its capacity by almost 20 times in six years, from the current 4.7 GW (MNRE 2016).Such tremendous growth can only be accomplished through an effective policy and regulatory framework, which is essential to incentivise the deployment of RE. Pegels and Lu?tkenhorst (2014) state that government intervention is particularly necessary for energy policy because market mechanisms such as falling prices alone are not sufficient to ensure the development of long-term sustainable infrastructure. They further say that as a nation's energy policy determines the future of the basic public services, it is important to have a holistic view from the political, socio-economic and technological aspects. In India however, RE policy interventions have not taken such a holistic approach. Current national policies such as preferential-grid access, Feed in Tariffs (FiT), Renewable Purchase Obligations (RPO) on utilities, tax holidays, RE Certificate (REC) trading and Accelerated Depreciation (AD) only address techno-economic barriers. While these are surely important incentives, in the past they haven't been sufficient for Indian states to meet their RE targets. Further, it appears unlikely that India will manage to meet its FY 16 targets in the next few months looking at the large gap between target and achievement (Figure 1). does India need to do to ensure that it's RE aspirations do not remain a pipedream? As Sreekumar and Chitnis (2014) point out, in order to have a complete idea of the electricity sector, in addition to techno-economic considerations, a political perspective is also imperative. Hence, this article attempts to answer the question posed above by providing insights into the political economy of the RE sector in India. Key observations from an extensive stakeholder consultation (n=20) conducted in the Indian state of Karnataka have been used in this study (CSTEP 2014).This case study revealed that despite high targets and two comprehensive RE policies (GoK 2014; GoK 2010) the deployment of RE technologies has faced significant barriers in Karnataka during the past five years. The state was unable to meet its targets for RE capacity installation in all renewable sources (biomass, wind, solar, small-hydro) that were laid down in the Karnataka 2009-2014 RE policy. Although the state did have an impressive 10 per cent of its electricity from RE sources in Financial Year (FY) '13, there was an unmet peak demand of 1.4 GW and electricity deficit of 14 per cent (CSTEP 2013)

Linear Precoders for Non-Regenerative Asymmetric Two-way Relaying in Cellular Systems

Two-way relaying (TWR) reduces the spectral-efficiency loss caused in conventional half-duplex relaying. TWR is possible when two nodes exchange data simultaneously through a relay. In cellular systems, data exchange between base station (BS) and users is usually not simultaneous e.g., a user (TUE) has uplink data to transmit during multiple access (MAC) phase, but does not have downlink data to receive during broadcast (BC) phase. This non-simultaneous data exchange will reduce TWR to spectrally-inefficient conventional half-duplex relaying. With infrastructure relays, where multiple users communicate through a relay, a new transmission protocol is proposed to recover the spectral loss. The BC phase following the MAC phase of TUE is now used by the relay to transmit downlink data to another user (RUE). RUE will not be able to cancel the back-propagating interference. A structured precoder is designed at the multi-antenna relay to cancel this interference. With multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) nodes, the proposed precoder also triangulates the compound MAC and BC phase MIMO channels. The channel triangulation reduces the weighted sum-rate optimization to power allocation problem, which is then cast as a geometric program. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol over conventional solutions.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Linear and Nonlinear Optical Properties of Mn doped Benzimidazole Thin Films

In the present work, the Mn doped benzimidazole (BMZ) thin films were prepared by simple chemical bath deposition technique. The material was directly deposited as thin film on glass substrates and the metal concentration in the solution was varied in weight percentage in order to investigate the dopant effect on the properties of thin films. Similarly, the Mn doped BMZ films were deposited in different solution temperature to study the effect of deposition temperature on the properties of thin films. The PXRD and FT-IR spectroscopy are used to study the structural and the presence of functional groups in the BMZ medium. Depending upon the solution temperature, thickness of the films varying from 0.6 to 1.2 {\mu}m and the optical transparency of the samples increases with the increasing temperature up to 50 {\deg}C. Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) efficiency of the films is measured for all the films. Third order nonlinear optical properties of the films were analyzed using Z-scan technique. The experimental results show that Mn doped BMZ films exhibits saturation absorption and negative nonlinearity.Comment: This has been presented in DAE 58th Solid State Symposium held at Thapar University, Patiala, Punjab, India. Will be published in AIP conference proceedings soo

A method of cleaning microscope slides for their repeated use in the examination of sputum for tubercle bacilli

The difficulty with which acid-fast bacilli are removed from glass slides has led several workers to recommend that only new slides should be used for the preparation of smears to demonstrate the presence of tubercle bacilli (Wilson and Miles, 1955; Baker, Silverton and Luckock, 1957; Cruickshank, 1960). This practice cannot easily be followed in many countries where microscope slides of good quality are expensive and often difficult to obtain. The experiment reported here was under-taken to determine whether a modern method of cleaning, incorporating the use of a detergent, can remove the tubercle bacilli from glass slides on which they have been heat-fixed and stained

Anticonvulsant drugs and women with seizures

The incidence of congenital anomalies in children born to mothers under anticonvulsant therapy has been studied, in 2536 women who gave birth to 3348 children. The follow up period varied between 3 to 20 years. The mothers had received barbiturates, hydantoinates and carbamezapine in various combinations. The incidence of congenital anomalies noted was only 41, a figure not greater than the incidence ofanomalies in the general population. A plea is made that anticonvulsant therapy should not be discontinued during pregnancy in women with seizures

Using metallic photonic crystals as visible light sources

In this paper we study numerically and experimentally the possibility of using metallic photonic crystals (PCs) of different geometries (log-piles, direct and inverse opals) as visible light sources. It is found that by tuning geometrical parameters of a direct opal PC one can achieve substantial reduction of the emissivity in the infrared along with its increase in the visible. We take into account disorder of the PC elements in their sizes and positions, and get quantitative agreement between the numerical and experimental results. We analyze the influence of known temperature-resistant refractory host materials necessary for fixing the PC elements, and find that PC effects become completely destroyed at high temperatures due to the host absorption. Therefore, creating PC-based visible light sources requires that low-absorbing refractory materials for embedding medium be found.Comment: 9 pages, 15 figure

Ordered reduced set successive detector for low complexity, quasi-ML MIMO detection

An Ordered Reduced Set Successive Detector (RSSD) for the V-BLAST spatial multiplexing scheme that uses a general two-dimensional non-uniform set partitioning for different symbols. The detector provides improved diversity and SNR gains at reduced complexity compared to a uniform set partitioning based detector. The detector can be used to reduce the complexity, with a small tradeoff in performance. Further, it is possible to obtain a quasi-ML performance using the disclosed detector at a reduced, yet fixed, complexity