Energy Shift
Countries was energy sovereignty. With renewables and nuclear, the challenge is not having the energy but storing it.
Last week, the news touted the launch of India’s first hydrogen-powered train. The story is not one of railway modernisation but one of energy and technology shift.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off India’s first hydrogen-powered train on 17 July; the journey covered 89 kms from Jind to Sonepat in Haryana. With this, India joined the small league of countries with hydrogen-operated railways, including Germany, Japan, China, the US and France.
The 10-coach passenger train runs on hydrogen fuel cell technology, a major step towards clean rail transportation, according to a press release by the government. This makes it significantly larger than most hydrogen trains globally, which are around three to four coaches long.
The train has also been designed, developed and manufactured entirely in India, designed by the Research, Designs and Standards Organisation and assembled at the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai.
Source: The Print
India barely produces any crude oil. It imports all of its demand for crude oil, and this leaves the country with a huge import bill, which hurts the currency, the budgets of the government and the common man. When war mongering commences in the Middle East, Indians are often left holding the bag. A shift away from oil is a great thing for India in every way imaginable.
Electric mobility, which is currently touted as an alternative, does not achieve this goal because more than 50% of the energy produced in India comes from coal, oil, and gas. The only upside is that the pollution and the consumption of fossil fuels have been moved to another location.
What is needed is a fundamental shift in the energy source itself.
India has access to a lot of renewable energy since there is sunshine throughout the year. In addition to that, the 11,000 Km coastline ensures ample availability of wind. The problem with renewable energy is that it is not constant. It rises and falls. The sun is not shining in the sky at night. One way around this is to store that energy for later use. Producing hydrogen could be one way to store that energy. Think of Hydrogen as a battery.
Deploying a new fuel directly to consumers is impractical.
The problem with consumer transportation is that it is driven by network effects. EVs faced the same problem for years. You could buy the car, but if you go on a highway, where will you charge it? The problem wasn’t intractable. Innovators need certain incentives to solve these problems, and they need to see that there is going to be a sufficient market when they produce a solution. As the governments across the world started to push EV policies and chose it as the lowest hanging fruit to show that they were serious about climate change, 100s of businesses got into the act of trying to solve these issues.
I have argued for a long time that Hydrogen is a better solution than the current EVs since EVs still require the mining of a lot of metals regularly, and most of this is highly polluting in nature. EVs are a tool for greenwashing. The pollution caused is hidden in mines and supply chains that exist in invisible corners of the world. The mining and processing of metals needed for producing an EV battery causes as much pollution as a petrol car that has been driven 40,000 kilometres.
No solution starts at 100% efficiency. People work and innovate to reach there. In 2000, an electric car with a battery pack was considered impossible. The physics did not work. The weight of the battery pack was so high that all of the energy it stored would be spent hauling the battery pack itself. Then people innovated. On materials, battery compounds, motor drives, energy distribution and a whole load of other things to make the modern electric vehicle possible.
It also sucked all of the research dollars away from other fuel sources, such as hydrogen. This was not by chance but by design. If you are an entrepreneur who is betting that electric vehicles are the future, you would not want equal effort being put into a competing technology. Hydrogen has been deprived of research dollars.
I have also argued that the best way to roll out a new technology is to find closed systems where the technology can be tried and tested. Airports are a great use case, the vehicles - buses, never have to go outside the perimeter of the airport, they have a captive user, and the trips are short enough in case of any failure. Also, they are all owned by a single customer. Electric was first tested out in airports. Without even realising, for the last 10 years, you have been moving around airports in electric buses.
In India, the railways are a monopoly run by the government. It is a closed system with one operator. An operator who has several routes, long and short, with its own engineering team to troubleshoot and solve. This is the perfect starting point for a new technology.
There will be more innovation in this space to make it more energy efficient and safer. But that innovation will only happen when there is a sufficient market available for those innovators.
The entry of a customer, such as the Indian Railways, augurs well for that innovation to occur.