Environment & Ecology Quiz: Renewable Energy in India

Anthracite is the oldest and hardest grade of coal, with the highest proportion of carbon, so it gives the most heat for its weight and burns with a clean, almost smokeless flame.

A geothermal plant takes steam or hot water from a natural underground reservoir, whose temperature is set by the rock and rarely approaches what a furnace can produce, so both the temperature and the pressure at the turbine are well below those of a coal-fired steam plant, and the thermal…

The alliance has its secretariat on the campus of the National Institute of Solar Energy at Gwal Pahari in Gurugram, and because it rests on a framework agreement among its members it is the first treaty-based international organisation to be headquartered in India.

The mission was launched in January 2010 as one of the eight national missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change, and its aim was to make solar power competitive by building capacity in stages and by supporting domestic manufacturing.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel formed over millions of years from buried organic matter; the stock is fixed, so every unit burnt is gone, and it releases carbon dioxide when burnt, although less than coal for the same heat.

Muppandal lies in the far south of the state near Kanyakumari, where the wind pushed through a break in the Western Ghats blows strongly and steadily for much of the year, and Tamil Nadu has long been among the leading wind states of the country.

The Puga valley in eastern Ladakh carries hot springs and sulphur deposits and is the best studied geothermal field in the country, the heat coming from the young mountain building of the Himalaya.

Both are long, narrowing inlets on the coast of Gujarat, and such a shape funnels the incoming tide so that the difference between high and low water is large, which is exactly what a tidal power scheme needs; the Sundarbans coast is the other site usually named.

The plan set out eight missions covering solar energy, enhanced energy efficiency, sustainable habitat, water, the Himalayan ecosystem, a green India, sustainable agriculture and strategic knowledge for climate change, and every later programme in this field refers back to it.

Projects of this size and below fall under the small hydro programme of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, while larger schemes are handled as conventional hydro power by the Ministry of Power.

It grew out of a department for non-conventional energy sources created in 1982, became a full ministry in 1992 and took its present name in 2006, and India is among the very few countries in the world to have a separate ministry devoted to this sector.