In the economic city of Morbi in Gujarat, the air often hums with the roar of gas-fired kilns producing hundreds of thousands of sq. metres of ceramic tiles. Today, nevertheless, almost 1 / 4 of the city’s ceramic models have gone silent. Nearly a thousand kilometres away in Ludhiana, Punjab, one in all India’s largest hosiery and knitwear clusters is going through an analogous silence. The purpose is geopolitical.
As the battle between the U.S. and Iran intensifies, the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most significant oil and gasoline artery, has changed into a gauntlet. India imports almost half of its pure gasoline and instantly felt the pinch — rendered extra painful by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas slashing gasoline allocations to non-priority industrial sectors to simply 65-80% of their contracted volumes.
For producers in clusters like Morbi and Ludhiana, the place companies have begun exploring alternate options to gasoline and different fossil fuels, the current disaster should be a second of validation as they transfer in the direction of the large-scale electrification of heat. For others, nevertheless, it may possibly seem to be an ultimatum to fast-track decarbonisation and, for India general, a reminder that it needs thermal independence, i.e. a ‘sovereign’ supply of heat, relatively than simply power independence.
Sunlight to heat
For many years, industrial heat has been synonymous with burning hydrocarbons like coal or gasoline. In Ludhiana’s textile mills, as an illustration, giant boilers burn gasoline to create steam utilized in dyeing and ending. In Morbi, gasoline flames bake tiles at temperatures exceeding 1,000 °C.
Rooftop photo voltaic photovoltaic panels have turn out to be widespread however they’re designed to produce electrical energy, not the uncooked, intense heat that industries demand, so that is the place applied sciences corresponding to concentrated photo voltaic thermal (CST) may turn out to be related. Whereas photovoltaics use semiconductors to convert renewable daylight right into a stream of electrons, CST makes use of exactly managed mirrors to focus daylight onto a receiver, the place it heats a fluid like water or molten salt to up to 400 °C.
Most textile processes, together with scouring and bleaching, require a temperature between 100 °C and 180 °C. In precept, mills may set up parabolic troughs on manufacturing unit grounds or close by land to generate pressurised steam straight from daylight. According to knowledge from the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, India has a CST potential of 6.4 GW. Adoption, nevertheless, stays low — however as gasoline costs have already tripled due to the conflict in West Asia, the payback interval for a CST set up may additionally shrink from the present seven years.
Efficient heat switch
For greater than a century, in a extremely inefficient course of, folks at properties, engineers in laboratories, and industrial operators have burnt gas to create sizzling air, then transferred that heat to a product. A gasoline boiler loses 20-30% of its power simply within the exhaust. One proposed route to decarbonising industrial heat replaces the flame with electromagnetic heating strategies corresponding to induction or plasma. For instance, an induction range passes an electrical present by a coil, making a magnetic area that generates heat straight contained in the steel or within the materials being processed. There isn’t any middleman substance like air or steam that takes away part of the heat, so the effectivity charges of such heaters have been identified to exceed 90%.
High-temperature industries in India, corresponding to ceramics, and world wide are additionally exploring applied sciences corresponding to plasma torches for high-temperature industrial processes.. Here, gasoline is ionised to a state referred to as plasma — colloquially referred to as the fourth state of matter — which may attain temperatures better than these on the floor of the solar. Plasma torches additionally enable customers to carefully management their temperature, thus stopping under- or over-heating for various processes.
The larger query, nevertheless, is whether or not India’s grid is prepared. If giant industrial clusters corresponding to Ludhiana and Morbi quickly switched to electrical heating applied sciences, the extra load would pose a big problem for the facility grid. This is as a result of industrial heat at the moment accounts for round 25% of India’s complete power consumption and shifting that load from gasoline pipes to electrical wires could be a profound engineering problem.
Need for thermal coverage
Most factories function on a 24/7 cycle whereas photo voltaic and wind power are intermitted, so so as to electrify heat for trade, India needs round the clock renewable energy, which entails a big rollout of battery power storage methods and pumped hydro storage. At current, India’s storage capability is in its infancy and with out it the grid isn’t able to maintain the massive ‘spikes’ of power that heavy industrial induction furnaces demand.
Second, native energy grids in industrial clusters like Ludhiana are sometimes ageing. High-capacity induction heating requires high-voltage substations and bolstered cabling for final mile provide. Asset-loading studies from DISCOMs in industrial clusters counsel that roughly 1 / 4 to a 3rd of distribution transformers may be critically loaded throughout peak hours, with scant headroom for added demand like for electrified heat. So including industrial masses would require considerably extra transformer capability.
These constraints intensify CST’s benefit, particularly as a supply of heat that doesn’t rely upon the grid. By producing thermal power on-site and storing it in insulated tanks, a manufacturing unit can proceed working even at night time with out drawing a single watt from the nationwide grid. Thermal storage can be an order of magnitude cheaper than lithium-ion battery storage.
To survive the LPG disaster and full the transition to electrified heat, India needs a ‘National Thermal Policy’. Its present subsidies focus closely on electrical energy (photovoltaics particularly) whereas there are few incentives for direct-heat applied sciences like CST. The authorities ought to think about offering the identical accelerated depreciation and production-linked incentives to CST mirror producers that it gave to photo voltaic cell producers. India additionally needs to reform the carbon market to enable factories in Morbi, say, to promote their ‘avoided emissions’ by the nascent Carbon Credit Trading Scheme and use the income to offset the excessive capital price of electrical kilns.
Oman, Spain, Denmark examples
Industries also can profit from hybrid options given the inherent benefits of having the ability to modernise with out junking their current infrastructure first. For instance, a CST system can function at day, a small gas-based backup system can assist peak masses, and induction coils can present heat for precision processes. The ‘Miraah’ venture in Oman gives a helpful instance: engineers built-in one of many world’s largest concentrated photo voltaic thermal crops with an current gas-fired industrial operation. Thus, photo voltaic power generates steam in daytime, decreasing gasoline consumption by almost 80%, whereas the gasoline boilers had been on standby and for nighttime use.
The ‘Solar Heat for Industrial Processes’ initiatives in Spain have allowed the corporate Solatom to develop plug-and-play photo voltaic thermal models: pre-assembled, containerised mirror arrays {that a} manufacturing unit can set up on a roof or a small parking zone and join straight to its current steam community. Denmark reformed its power market to assist heat buy agreements, whereby an exterior supplier installs and maintains a CST or induction system and the manufacturing unit merely buys the heat at a set charge, usually cheaper than gasoline; the federal government additionally supported the initiative by investing in large-scale thermal storage that may maintain ‘excess’ heat for days. Such options considerably decrease the engineering prices for brand spanking new adopters.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
