MANA PATHASALA: 05/04/15

Monday, 4 May 2015

The myth of green building

There is no question that India and other parts of the still-under-construction world must build green. The building sector is a major contributor to climate change and local environmental destruction because of construction materials used; energy expended for lighting, heating and cooling; and water consumption and waste discharge. This is the threat. There is an opportunity as well. Most of India is still unbuilt—over 70 per cent of the building stock is yet to be constructed—so unlike the rest of the already developed world, India can build anew in efficient and sustainable manner. But how?

This is an issue that has been troubling us at the Centre for Science and Environment. Over the past few years the idea of green buildings has gained popularity—everybody, it would seem, has turned a new leaf. Across the country large and small constructions are advertised as the greenest of green. To prove that they are indeed environment-friendly, the business of certification has also grown. There are agencies that now rate and award stars to individual buildings based on certain parameters. Many state governments are making these same standards of “greenness” mandatory. Some are even providing incentives, like exemptions on property tax, to those buildings that qualify as environment-friendly.

All this is important but do we know what green means?

When we began asking this question, what surprised us was the hostility with which it was received. Nobody wanted the new God to be questioned. Nobody wanted to be asked something as simple as what the post-commissioning performance of a green building was. We realised that the interests—of architects, builders, auditors and certifiers—in this new industry were already entrenched. It was a cozy club and nobody was keen to give us entry.

We dug in our heels. Buildings are the key to a cleaner and greener future. The building sector uses, already, some 40 per cent of the country’s electricity generation. So, every effort made to reduce energy intensity of buildings will go a long way. We wanted to know what was happening and what more could be done to reduce the material-use footprint and emissions of every construction.

What we discovered is not a convenient truth. My colleagues have put together a book, Building Sense: Beyond the Green Façade of Sustainable Habitat, to bust some myths and explore alternative approaches. What they find is as follows.

First, the general approach is to build wrongly and then “fit” in the green features. For instance, glass-enveloped buildings are certified green, simply because they install double or triple insulating glass or five-star air-conditioners to cool places that were first heated up deliberately.

Secondly, rating systems are being pushed through government and municipal schemes without any evidence that green-certified buildings are actually working. Data on the performance of the green buildings after they have been commissioned was, till very recently, not disclosed. So, even though rating agencies say that green-certified buildings save between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of the energy and reduce water consumption by 20-30 per cent, they have no corroborating data.

Thirdly, all these so-called green technologies end up hiking costs to the extent that buildings become unaffordable to most. What India needs are building standards that are appropriate and cost-effective. Green architecture should not be a barrier to inclusive growth.

This is where old knowledge has a role to play. Traditional architecture is based on the principle of “localising” buildings so that they can optimise natural elements and be efficient in resource use. This “science and art” of engineers for nature needs to be infused with the new material knowledge of modern architecture.

Many architects, engineers and builders are innovating with this old-new science. That’s how the knowledge and practice of affordable and sustainable buildings will evolve. But big builders will adopt it only if and when the façade of green buildings is lifted. This is what we hope to do.

INDIA ENVIRONMENT PORTAL

Act locally, benefit globally

Author(s): Sunita Narain @sunitanar

This is a real life story of the world’s three wicked problems, one opportunity and a new way to confront global challenges.

Climate change, we know enough to say emphatically, is a wicked problem. It was in 1992 that the world started its formal journey to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions with the signing of the UN framework convention on climate change in Rio at the Earth Summit. More than 20 years later, not much has changed. The weather is becoming more unpredictable, more extreme and we are all at risk. Worse, the world is failing to negotiate how it will share economic growth that is intricately linked to CO2 emissions.

Air pollution in our cities is another wicked problem. It was in the 1990s that Delhi started its journey to clean its air. It changed its fuel to compressed natural gas, which emits much less emissions than conventional fuels like diesel. It used cleaner fuel to run its public transport vehicles. But even as this happened, the number of private vehicles surged. Worse, the use of diesel increased. As a result, pollution is back with a vengeance.

After years of the world becoming “modern” as many as 2.67 billion people—over 40 per cent of the world’s people—still burn biomass in their inefficient and dirty cook stoves. This is another wicked problem. Efforts to provide clean energy for cooking began in the early 1980s, when the world was worried, not about the pollution from stoves, but about the prospect of losing forests because of firewood collection. This did not happen in a country like India. Even today rural and poor Indians, constituting 75 per cent of the population, use inefficient stoves and inhale toxins that are now understood to be the world’s number one killer.

So, how do these three wicked problems come together? The answer lies in the dark core of the particulate matter called black carbon, which is emitted by diesel vehicles, cook stoves and brick kilns. Till recently, particulate matter was understood to be a local pollutant. Today we know that a fraction of it comprises black carbon, which can absorb heat and warm up the surrounding atmosphere. It is, therefore, not just a local pollutant, it has global warming impacts. The extent of its warming potential is still being debated, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has doubled its estimate of warming from black carbon aerosols from its previous report. So, the opportunity is one of co-benefit: reduce emissions from diesel vehicles and cook stoves, and get the additional advantage of combating climate change.

How much and how? Anil Agarwal Dialogue, 2015—an annual event organised by the Centre for Science and Environment in the memory of its founder-director and environmentalist— discussed this earlier in March. The key issue that emerged is that the world needs to act differently; it must recognise that global action will be local.

In other words, the world must recognise that black carbon is a local pollutant and that action must be directed to address its local health concern. The co-benefit agenda is important but incidental. In addition, it must be clear that black carbon must not distract the world from the agenda to cut CO2. We know that CO2 has a long life in the atmosphere—once emitted it stays for roughly 100 years and, therefore, determines the temperature change in the long term. Black carbon has a short life of less than eight days, so any effort to cut it brings immediate benefits. More importantly, black carbon cannot become a proxy for real action to cut CO2. Nor can it be used to shift the blame and burden to the developing world.

It is also clear that action on black carbon must differentiate between the luxury emissions from diesel vehicles and the survival emissions from cook stoves of the poor. Not only because politics demands this, but also because science preaches this. The fact is that diesel emissions have a higher share of light-absorbing black carbon that has a definite warming impact. Biomass-based cook stoves have a higher proportion of organic carbon that scatters sunlight and cools the atmosphere.

While luxury emissions have to be targeted aggressively for both local and global benefits, survival emissions of the poor need supportive and enabling action. And even if this action requires countries to provide LPG, the fossil fuel energy for cooking, then they should do so. The poor’s energy needs cannot be held to ransom, when the world’s rich are addicted to fossil fuel and are the cause of catastrophic changes in our climate. What this does suggest is that the world can do things differently. Today, it is the world’s poor who are not yet in the fossil trap. They can drive, cook or build homes in the cleanest and greenest manner.

This will, however, require global leaders to “do leadership” differently. Not what we see today: national concerns masked by a global front.

INDIA ENVIRONMENT PORTAL

Coal Toll

Author(s): Chandra Bhushan @Bh_Chandra , Priyavrat Bhati @ , Sanjeev Kumar K... @ , Angeline Sangee..., Soundaram Ramanathan @ , Abhishek Rudra @ , N Sai Siddhartha @

More than 70 per cent of India's electricity is produced by coal-fired power plants. Most of them do not have modern technologies and use low-grade coal that is low on energy content and high on waste. As a result, the coal power sector is one of the most polluting and resource wasteful. These are the findings of a two-year study by non-profit Centre for Science and Environment that rated the plants on environment and energy performance. The best performing plant could get only an average Three Leaves Award by scoring about 50 per cent marks, while awhopping 40 per cent of the sample scored less than 20 per cent. Since coal is crucial to meet the energy needs of the country, its use will grow. This will intensify pollution and resource conflicts unless the industry shapes up and regulators improve pollution standards and scrutiny.

A report by Chandra Bhushan, Priyavrat Bhati, Sanjeev Kumar Kanchan, Angeline Sangeetha Suresh, Soundaram Ramanathan, Abhishek Rudra and N Sai Siddhartha

Illustration: Tarique Aziz

India's powersector, based predominantly on coal-fired plants, is one of the most polluting sectors of Indian industry. To highlight key environmental issues and rate the performance of power plants, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) intensively studied the sector for two years, covering 47 coal- and lignite-based thermal plants with a capacity of 54 gigawatts (GW), half of the Indian capacity when the study began in early 2012. CSE’s assessment found glaring inconsistencies between pollution data, especially stack emissions, reported by plants and actual conditions on the ground. Events like breach of ash dykes, which would be considered disasters in other countries, were taken in stride as common —a number of water bodies were found to be polluted with ash.

No country in the world uses coal as poor in quality as India, so our pollution challenges are huge. But our practices to overcome this challenge were found wanting. India’s standards for pollution and resource use lag far behind global norms, but its power plants fail to meet even such relaxed levels of performance, lacking the basic technologies to control pollution. With state pollution control boards understaffed to monitor performance, power plants routinely flout norms; nevertheless, the plants almost always report compliance. The situation is complicated by the fact that the power sector is a critical sector of the Indian economy. Thus, under the rationale of the need for power, even the most inefficient and polluting plants are allowed to operate. With one of the poorest levels of energy access and per capita consumption of electricity, at a third of the world average, India needs to rapidly expand its generation capacity.

Coal is the fuel of choice. Being plentiful and easy to mine, it provides reliable and dispatchable power. Capacity of coal-fired plants is projected to double between 2012 and 2022 and will contribute nearly 75 per cent of generation. Current environmental practices will have to be improved to make this increase acceptable. Coal-based electricity entails heavy costs on the environment, resources and health. It is responsible for significant emissions of harmful particulate matter and oxides of nitrogen and sulphur. Domestic coal’s high ash content introduces additional challenges of disposing off ash that has toxic heavy metals. Coal-based power consumes large amounts of water; coal mining has severe impacts on land, air and water which exacerbate the environmental footprint of coal-based power.

Instead of capturing the full costs of coal-based power, India’s tariff system subsidises it— land and water is provided at low costs and coal is subsidised; weak or non-existent pollution norms mean plants do not have to invest in pollution abatement technologies; finally, costs such as health impact and environmental damage, called externalities, are left out of the tariff calculations. These make electricity from coal “affordable”.

An environmental audit

Of a total of 104 coal- and lignite-based thermal power plants in India with a capacity of 98 GW in early 2012, the Green Rating Project (GRP) team of CSE assessed 47 plants with a capacity of 54 GW (see ‘Report card’). The sample was chosen to present a comprehensive picture of the sector, with wide representations from all regions, types of ownerships (Central, state and private), companies and unit sizes (see ‘Rating process’). The GRP team considered only the generation phase—from the entry of coal inside the plant boundary till the generation of electricity—to assess the plants. Although coal mining has significant environmental impacts, it was not considered because it requires independent assessment.

Source: Green Rating Project, 2014-15, CSE, New Delhi

Overall, 46 per cent of the selected plants agreed to participate in the ratings, which means they submitted detailed data and allowed the GRP team to visit the plant and audit its performance (see ‘Shy of public scrutiny’). GRP surveyors visited all of the 47 plants, spending several days at each, and conducted extensive interviews of all stakeholders, including community, media, NGOs, pollution control board officials and plant employees. They also collected extensive data from secondary, publicly-available sources for both participating and non-participating plants to prepare profiles of individual plants.

Shy of public scrutiny

Participation BY the coal-based thermal power sector in the Green Rating Project (GRP) was low, partly because a number of plants run by Central government-owned companies refused to participate. NTPC, the leading player, was the chief culprit with none of its six plants in the sample agreeing to provide data. The generation-related information was sought under the RTI Act from the six NTPC plants, but all declined the request citing confidentiality and competition-sensitive data. The Central Electricity Authority, the government regulator, asks all power plants to submit key generation-related data. NTPC has refused to allow even the regulator to publish efficiency data related to it. GRP did gather information from the regulatory bodies and local community and media. It found the NTPC plants to be heavily polluting and facing numerous complaints.

All companies that were selected, were rated irrespective of their participation to make sure the exercise was objective and unbiased. Companies were analysed with reference to global best practices and Indian averages. A technical advisory panel consisting of top industry and pollution experts oversaw the entire process to ensure credibility. They include B Sengupta, former member secretary, Central Pollution Control Board; Avinash Chandra, former professor and head of Centre for Energy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi; Umesh S Bapat, former vice president of Operations Eastern Region, Tata Power; and Y P Abbi, former director of Power Station Engineering, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd.

GRP rated the sector on about 60 key parameters which were assigned weightages depending on their environmental impacts (see ‘Weightage assigned...’). Resource use and pollution were assigned equally high weightages.

Resource guzzlers

Power plants utilise huge resources; communities benefit little from them

High emissions from all the stacks in MAHAGENCO, Chandrapur (Photo: Aparna Pallavi)

Coal-based thermal power plants in India are heavy utilisers of resources. Land, water and most importantly, coal are used in large quantities. Most communities located near the plants do not benefit significantly from these plants although they share their resources with them.

Land: Situated on the southern fringe of Delhi, NTPC’s 705 MW Badarpur power station is luxuriously spread over 874 hectares (ha). Of this, 362 ha has been used to dispose of its waste. A few kilometres away, Sangam Vihar’s 1 million residents are packed into about 680 ha.

The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) suggests using 0.44 ha per MW of capacity. CSE data found that the plants possessed far more, using an average of 0.72 hectares/MW, of which over 40 per cent was used for disposing ash; old state-owned plants used nearly four times more area per MW than private plants. If land used for coal mining, water reservoirs and ash ponds is added to this, a 1,000 MW plant would use about 8,800 ha over its life, a figure that dwarfs land use for all technologies except hydropower.

GRP study found widespread mistrust in local communities related to acquisition of land for power plants. Most said that adequate compensation was not paid and jobs and benefits did not materialise. These past experiences are impeding land acquisition for upcoming projects.

Coal: India consumed about 700 million tonnes of coal in 2012-13, of which 70 per cent was used for power generation. The insatiable demand by the power sector has been the major driver of coal mining, an activity responsible for significant environment damage. A number of districts where Coal India Ltd (CIL) has extensive mining operations have been classified as critically polluted by the Central Pollution Control Board. Nearly 22 per cent of India’s forest land diversions (44,900 ha) between 2007 and 2012 were for coal mining. CIL, a public sector company, which mines about 80 per cent of the coal in the country, is notorious for its poor compliance. Its mining operations have devastated large swathes of land.

The biggest issue involved in the use of coal as a resource is pollution. Indian coal is of poor quality: around a third of the country’s coal content is ash; it also has fewer calories hence more of it needs to be burnt to generate power. The result is more emissions and ash, necessitating better pollution control technologies. But the case is just the opposite, with lower investment in pollution control.

Since transporting coal with high ash is economically inefficient, regulations cap ash content at 34 per cent for plants located beyond 1,000 km from the mine. However, four of 12 plants in the study which fell under this category–-GSECL in Wanakbori, TANGEDCO in Tuticorin, HPGCL in Hisar and MAHAGENCO in Nashik–-were using higher ash content coal. Based on our survey, we believe a lot more plants were violating this norm as they were getting poor quality coal from CIL. Reducing ash in coal is possible by “washing”. However, India’s coal washing capacity is a meagre 131 million tonnes against the current need of over 240 million tonnes.

The study found coal handling, considered the most accident-prone activity in a plant, to be seriously deficient. It is routinely outsourced to unskilled contract workers with little health benefits; safety protocols are ignored in most plants. Most had poor provisions for controlling dust emissions and water pollution: almost all power plants stored coal in open yards with no wind breakers; some of the plants studied transported coal through uncovered conveyor systems. Also, very few plants had proper storm drainage system; most posed the risk of leaching into groundwater or overflowing into nearby fields and water bodies. For instance, the Guru Gobind Singh Super Thermal Power plant in Ropar, Punjab, was found storing coal rejects in a low-lying area with water logging leading to acidification.

Water: In the dry, water-starved desert district of Bikaner lies Neyveli Lignite Corporation Barsingsar’s massive 12 ha reservoir, fed by water from Indira Gandhi Canal, the lifeline of Rajasthan. Thirty per cent of the reservoir’s water is lost to evaporation. This does not bother the company since it pays a paltry Rs 0.7 per cubic metre. Even for JSWEL, Toranagallu, which paid the most for water in the study (Rs 20 per cubic metre), the water cost was a mere 0.9 per cent of the tariff it received for power. As a result, wasteful consumption is common. At an average of 4 cubic metre per MWh, Indian plants with cooling towers consume twice as much water as their global counterparts (see ‘Indian plants are...’).

Some plants, such as JSEB, Patratu (9.8 m3/ MWh) and DVC, Bokaro ‘B’ (8.7 m3/MWh), are profligate users as they use significant amount of water for cooling and ash handling. There are few encouraging examples such as GIPCL, Surat, and JSWEL, Toranagallu, that consume a scant 2 m3/MWh employing a host of water-efficient measures.

Nine plants in the study use fresh water for once-through-cooling, a process that is no longer permitted for new plants. These plants withdraw 7 billion cubic metres annually, a phenomenal 90 per cent of the total fresh water drawn by the plants studied. All of these plants are state-owned.

Exacerbating the situation is the fact that nearly half the plants studied are located in areas where severe water scarcity has been reported. Conflicts have ensued—plants such as KPCL, Raichur, and MAHAGENCO, Chandrapur, were forced to close down in the past due to water shortage. Overall, the thermal power industry’s annual water draw, estimated at 22 billion cubic metres, is equal to over half of India’s total domestic water needs.

Indian conservationist wins prestigious Whitley Award

Author(s): DTE Staff @

A single man’s fight to protect elephants has reduced man-animal conflict in Tamil Nadu

Indian conservationist Ananda Kumar has used innovative communication systems to reduce man-elephant conflict in southern India (Photo: Whitley Fund For Nature website)

Indian conservationist Ananda Kumar is a happy man these days. And he has every reason to be. For, Kumar has recently been awarded the Whitley Award, dubbed a “Green Oscar”, for creating an SMS-warning system to help tea and coffee plantation workers live safely among elephants.

Man-elephant conflict is a common phenomenon in Valparai plateau in Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore district. Here, people live in perpetual fear of unexpected encounters with elephants in the dark.
With forests gradually giving way to agricultural fields and human habitations, man-elephant conflicts have risen across India. In many places, elephant corridors have been proposed to ensure the safe and free passage of tuskers from one forest to another. Every year, 400 people and more than 100 elephants die across India, according to news reports.

In many states like Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, village residents resort to traditional methods to scare jumbos away. This includes lighting firecrackers and beating drums at night. However, in many cases these measures fail to act as elephants plunder homes and fields, often trampling unlucky victims.

Valparai—the conflict zone

Valparai, located in the Western Ghats, has numerous tea and coffee plantations. Beverage companies have transformed 22,000 hectares of prime rainforests for setting up their estates. Around 70,000 workers, who work in these plantations, live in an area surrounded on all sides by the forested Anamalai hills.

As dusk falls, these workers make their way back to colonies after a hard day’s work. But their journey is fraught with danger as there is a chance of encountering elephants on the way.
“They are scared. If I am there I am really scared,” Kumar was quoted by the media as saying. “It’s very difficult to make out elephants in the dark. It’s a huge animal and looks like a rock and will be standing very still when they notice people.”

About 2,000 elephants inhabit the Anamalai hills. Conflicts usually take place when every year these animals use the plantation route to reach other parts of the forest.

Photo: Karpagam Chelliah

“Elephants are strongly related to their ranges, this is scientifically established. It’s a part of their home, which is lost to plantations because of historical exploitation,” Kumar added.
The conservationist has spent 10 years working on a system of text messages, TV alerts and warning lights to keep track of elephants during their movement.

According to Kumar, if elephants are startled or they feel threatened, they can be very dangerous. In Valparai, 41 people have been killed since 1994.

“Out of 41 deaths, 36 people did not know there were elephants. If these people had known about the elephants’ location, all these people would have been alive,” Kumar said.

But animals like the elephant occupy an important place in religion in India and people learn to live with elephants rather than drive them away. “There is a gentle perception of elephants,” Kumar said, as they are considered a manifestation of the Hindu god Ganesha.

The success story

In a decade, Kumar’s warning system has cut the rate of deaths arising out of man-elephant conflicts to just one from three per year. It is being considered a novel idea in reducing conflicts across India.

The conservationist has developed an Elephant Information Network (EIN) which acts as an early warning mechanism to alert people when the animals are nearby.

A team comprising trackers, known as the conflict response team, watches over the elephants. It is assisted by the Tamil Nadu forestry department workers and local informants. Information is relayed via a hotline, monitored by Kumar’s colleague. The hotline receives over 1,000 calls each year. Many of these calls provide information about elephant sightings.

When an elephant is spotted in a particular area, alerts are sent via text messages to all people who reside within a few kilometres. At 5pm every day, TV stations broadcast the locations of elephants. The warnings also reach volunteer wardens, who operate red-warning beacons that light up via text messages. This allows people to plan their trips accordingly.

“The local communities have adopted this. Government has responded positively. It is a collective effort that is actually making it a win-win situation, both for elephants and for people,” said Kumar.

Incidents of elephants damaging property have reduced by half, he added.

Kumar’s challenge was not removing dangerous elephants from their habitats, but making both tuskers as well as humans feel safe in their habitats.

This is only the start of an exciting journey for him. Kumar will now use the award money to explore how the Valparai model can be replicated elsewhere.