LPG crisis: India needs to electrify heat and win thermal independence Premium

India must electrify industrial heat to achieve thermal independence amidst the ongoing LPG crisis and geopolitical challenges.

In the industrial town of Morbi in Gujarat, the air usually hums with the roar of gas-fired kilns producing millions of square metres of ceramic tiles. Today, however, nearly a quarter of the town’s ceramic units have gone silent. Nearly a thousand kilometres away in Ludhiana, Punjab, one of India’s largest hosiery and knitwear clusters is facing a similar silence. The reason is geopolitical.

As the conflict between the U.S. and Iran intensifies, the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most vital oil and gas artery, has turned into a gauntlet. India imports nearly half of its natural gas and immediately felt the pinch — rendered more painful by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas slashing gas allocations to non-priority industrial sectors to just 65-80% of their contracted volumes.

For manufacturers in clusters like Morbi and Ludhiana, where firms have begun exploring alternatives to gas and other fossil fuels, the present crisis must be a moment of validation as they move towards the large-scale electrification of heat. For others, however, it can seem like an ultimatum to fast-track decarbonisation and, for India overall, a reminder that it needs thermal independence, i.e. a ‘sovereign’ source of heat, rather than just energy independence.

For decades, industrial heat has been synonymous with burning hydrocarbons like coal or gas. In Ludhiana’s textile mills, for instance, large boilers burn gas to create steam used in dyeing and finishing. In Morbi, gas flames bake tiles at temperatures exceeding 1,000 °C.

Rooftop solar photovoltaic panels have become common but they are designed to produce electricity, not the raw, intense heat that industries demand, so this is where technologies such as concentrated solar thermal (CST) could become relevant. Whereas photovoltaics use semiconductors to convert renewable sunlight into a stream of electrons, CST uses precisely controlled mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver, where it heats a fluid like water or molten salt to up to 400 °C.

Most textile processes, including scouring and bleaching, require a temperature between 100 °C and 180 °C. In principle, mills could install parabolic troughs on factory grounds or nearby land to generate pressurised steam directly from sunlight. According to data from the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, India has a CST potential of 6.4 GW. Adoption, however, remains low — but as gas prices have already tripled due to the war in West Asia, the payback period for a CST installation could also shrink from the current seven years.