Smoke signals from the renewable energy sphere Premium

Technical innovation in India’s renewable energy policy is deepening a highly uneven energy landscape

The formal launch of the Indian Oil Corporation’s patented solar cook-stove at the India Energy Week 2023 (February 6-8, 2023 in Bengaluru as part of the G-20 calendar of events) by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi must be looked at closely from the point of view of India’s national energy story. While Mr. Modi claimed the stove would soon reach three crore households within the next few years, Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Hardeep Singh Puri called it a “catalyst in accelerating adoption of low-carbon options” along with biofuels, electric vehicles, and green hydrogen.

These pronouncements have followed a 99% cut in the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) subsidy (from the 2022-23 revised estimates) to low-income households in the 2023 Budget even as international fuel prices remain high. The government has claimed that the stove — priced at an eye-watering ₹15,000 — will transform cooking practices, save thousands of crores in LPG cost and forex, cut carbon dioxide emissions, and yield marketable carbon credits.

While past governments have failed to convince women to transform their household energy use through technical innovation, today, we are at an unprecedented crossroads in India’s renewable energy history.

The quest for renewable and decentralised technology in poor households has closely followed energy crises. Among the government’s earliest attempt to transform household energy consumption was the solar cooker of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), fabricated in the early 1950s, in a period of great uncertainty in food security and energy self-sufficiency. The Nehru government’s gambit on state-led hydroelectric power generation was a response to this crisis, but it failed to address the household energy consumption of the rural poor.

The solar cooker was met with international press coverage and newsreels in the cinema. But the ‘indigenous’ device, based on a 19th century innovation, was dead in the water. Apart from its prohibitive price, it cooked very slowly. As mathematician and historian D.D. Kosambi quipped, “Tried by ordinary mortals away from newsreel cameras, [the cooker] just refused to work.”

The debacle caused the NPL to steer clear of populist ‘applied science’ for the remainder of K.S. Krishnan’s directorship. Parallel efforts to improve the traditional stove proved similarly ineffective. For example, the Hyderabad Engineering Research Laboratories made a ‘smokeless chulha’ in 1953, the brainchild of its director S.P. Raju, who wished to bring “smokeless kitchens for the millions”. These stoves incorporated traditional cooking practices and locally sourced materials, but surveys documented the chulha’s limited uptake among rural women as it was found wanting in its design and durability.

Thereafter, the oil crisis of 1973 and an emerging forest conservation movement trained government attention on stoves that used firewood and cow dung. The international focus on “appropriate technologies” also reinforced the belief that for the energy needs of the poor, small was beautiful.