1/n
Last week TERI released its flagship report on the prospects for H2 in India.

The full report is here. bit.ly/3poYA2n

At 140 pages, I can't summarize the whole thing in a single thread, but I can do a series of threads.

Today's: H2 in the Indian power sector.
2/n
We do a bottom up assessment to 2050 of power demand across all sectors, including direct and indirect electrification (for electrolytic H2 production).

In the low carbon scenario, power demand reaches as much as 6200 TWh by 2050, with almost 1000 TWh of that for H2. 👇
3/n
This would consume a very substantial chunk of India's maximum estimated technical potential for onshore wind and solar PV. 👇
The required rate of supply growth and land footprint may be challenging!

This reinforces the message: direct electrification wherever possible.
4/n
To asses the role for power-H2-power in system balancing, we ran our hourly model for more than 60 scenarios.

Key message: we don't need long-term seasonal storage of the kind power-H2-power would be suitable for, until RE reaches very high levels.
5/n
There are several reasons for this:
1. Power-H2-power is expensive and inefficient.
2. Until you have high RE, conventional sources provide more cost effective seasonal balancing.
3. The dominant seasonality in India's power system is intraday not inter-season.
6/n
The per unit cost of decarbonizing the last 10-15% of generation with RE is high (~35 Rs/kWh).

This is driven largely by the cost of seasonal storage (although curtailed RE and intraday storage also adds to costs).

Again: H2 in the power system only when necessary!
7/n
At current costs, a fully decarbonized power system has higher system costs than the present system, largely because of the cost of squeezing out the last 10-20% of generation.
As technology costs fall to 2050, we estimate a fully decarbonized system may be cost effective.
8/n
Power-H2-power is complementary to wind, which introduces the most substantial inter-seasonal variability into the power system (demand is not very seasonal in India).
Low wind and electrolizer costs drive power-H2-power uptake, low solar and li-ion costs inhibit it.
9/n
To this extent, intraday li-ion and power-H2-power seasonal storage are - to a degree - substitutes 👇. This is because demand is not particularly seasonal, and the main source of seasonality - wind - depends on how much you build.
10/n
To this extent, power system decarbonization in India may depend less on the deployment of seasonal storage than in Northern Europe or North America, where both demand (heating) and supply (wind) have inherent substantial inter-seasonal variability.
11/n
Key take-aways:
1. The rapid baseline growth of demand makes prioritizing H2 even more important. Don't use it where electrification can get the job done!
2. Seasonal storage shouldn't be needed until you reach high RE shares.
12/n
3. How much seasonal storage you deploy depends on how much wind you deploy, which in turn depends on the relative economics of solar+li-ion versus wind.
4. With falling costs, a very high RE power system looks attractive in the long-term.

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More from @ThomasASpencer

30 Sep
1/n
In today's thread, I want to take a look at India's NDC target of reducing the GHG intensity of GDP by 33-35% by 2030, compared to 2005.

I argue that this target is essentially BAU, because India's GHG intensity of GDP is declining as a natural part of development.

Thread
2/n
If we take a long run view of the GHG intensity of India's economy since 1947, it can be seen that GHG intensity peaked in about 1985 and has been declining ever since.

Why is this?
3/n
Firstly, this pattern is common to developing countries across the long-run development trajectory:
- China
- South Korea
- Thailand
- Japan

All experienced this kind of peak and decline structure (Japan and Thailand somewhat early than I graph here).

Why is this?
Read 15 tweets
23 Sep
1/n
Yesterday Xi Jinping announced that China would peak its emissions and work towards net zero emissions by 2060.

What does this mean for India?

A short thread on why India is fundamentally different from China, and how it could respond in its climate diplomacy.
2/n
India is, simply put, a much poorer country than China. Its GDP at PPP is 57% below that of China. But I think this actually understates how far India is behind China.

Another way of looking: India's final energy consumption per capita is 70% below that of China.
3/n
Even at PPP, China's final energy intensity of GDP is 30% higher than India's.

Why is this? Essentially, it boils down to economic structure 👇. China's industry share in GDP is much higher than India, and China's industry sector is more energy intensive.
Read 15 tweets
21 Sep
1/n
@KanitkarT @tjayaraman
Thank you for clarifying that the source of your claim that developed country patenting in climate mitigation technologies has collapsed from 2009-10 to 2017.

This allowed me to go back and look through the data.

A (long) thread on innovation.
2/n
Firstly, as per your article, I don't think that you can use 2017 as the cut off for the analysis, because as noted in the OECD metadata "figures for the later years may be decreasing because of legal delays for publishing patent information."
3/n
Taking 'priority date' as the best reference date for the patenting (described in the metadata as "closest to the invention date ... To measure inventive activity, patent should be counted according to the priority date"), then data completeness is described as follows :
Read 18 tweets
19 Sep
@KanitkarT
@tjayaraman
1/8
In my thread on their article in the Hindu, I wrongly concluded that @KanitkarT and @tjayaraman had got India's and world per capita emissions wrong, as I didn't spot that they used tons C not tons CO2.
I've taken that tweet down and I'm sorry.
2/8
In my defense, no units were mentioned only 'emissions', and tons C is an odd unit to use in a newspaper article.

Adding units would have been good.

I think the rest of @KanitkarT responses to me miss the point. I'll respond to that here again.
3/8
On Germany, I was responding using it as a counterexample to a very specific claim in your piece, which you have sidestepped in your response to me.
You state "renewables at best can meet residential consumption and some part of the demand from the service sector".
Read 9 tweets
15 Sep
1/n
Yesterday BP released its 2020 World Energy Outlook, which got a lot of press for saying that global oil demand has already peaked.

In this thread, I want to unpick a little bit what the BP 2020 WEO says about India.

Lots of interesting stuff here.
2/n
The fig below shows primary consumption by fuel in the outlook's three scenarios.
You may be struck by high huge growth of coal in the BAU scenario (1.8 x between 2018 and 2050). I'll come back to this.
But more striking to me is the modest oil demand growth in the BAU. Image
3/n
Oil product demand grows less than 2x between 2018 and 2050. This is far lower than other comparable energy scenarios.
For example, the apparently transformative Shell Sky Scenario has India's oil product demand growing >3x between 2015-2050.
Read 10 tweets
11 Sep
1/6
Does India have a problem with 'just transition' of coal mining workers?
I spent some time today looking through the micro-data of the 2018-19 Periodic Labour Force Survey.

Thread.
2/6
In the 12 districts with the highest reported shares of coal mining employment (primary usual status):
1. Agriculture employment was a larger reported employer than coal in all but one.
2. Labour market exclusion was 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than coal employment.
👇 Image
3/6
NB: exclusion from the labour market does not include people in education.

Thus, even in the most coal intensive districts, the challenge is not creating alternative employment for coal miners as we transition away from coal.

It's a problem 2 orders of magnitude larger.
Read 6 tweets

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