India has launched a 648MW solar power plant
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Tamil Nadu, India - 648 MW - cost $677 mln - built in 8 months
...wait, what?
(for example, here's a much larger area in the same county for $35 million: http://www.landwatch.com/San-Luis-Obispo-County-California-F... )
edit: tack on another couple hundred million for power line easements and you still haven't explained all that much of the cost difference. And I really doubt that they spent anywhere near $300 million on land and easements.
http://solarcellcentral.com/images/module_prices.jpg http://www.data360.org/temp/dsg605_500_350.jpg http://costofsolar.com/management/uploads/2013/12/solar-pv-c...
Land costs were less than 2% ($0.03 per watt).
This is not a situation limited to solar energy. In India we have the social technology to organize men and build large projects. The US had this technology 100 years ago, but we've lost it.
Trains
Delhi metro, phase 2: 77 miles of track, 85 stations, $2.9B, 3 years.
Hudson Yards NYC: 1 mile of track, 1 station, $2.5B, 9 years.
Green line expansion, Boston: 4 miles of track, 4 stations, $3.1B, 7 years (if all goes according to plan).
Space exploration
Mangalyaan mission to mars: $74M.
A movie about Matt Damon getting stuck on mars: $108M.
The real answer is much more complicated and there is no easy one-size-fits-all answer. Environmental regulation, litigious environment in the construction industry, overuse of contractors and consultants instead of in house expertise, buy america provisions, labor scheduling rules, poor planning, supplier market that has been drastically cut off due to bidding complexity and procurement regulation, bad incentives, poor oversight, corruption, incompetence, etc ad infinitum. If you had to sum it up, you could say that the US is uniquely incompetent in all aspects of government-sponsored infrastructure projects.
India, although has achieved some good results, is mostly a third world country [1] (barring few metro places), and thus various project costs are mostly insignificant as compared to US California. Also cutting corners regarding project safety issues, labor safety issues is not uncommon in third world countries.
It is also similar to China being able to manufacture things at a cheaper price, with almost forced labor and no minimum wages comparable to USA.
It is also similar to Bangladesh being able to manufacture clothes at a cheaper price, with almost forced labor and no minimum wages comparable to USA.
Do you remember what happened in Bhopal? [2]
Granted, the company UCIL was American, but it was the Indian govt which allowed it to go scot-free.
India is not China - democracy (for the most part) still works as effectively as it does in the USA. For example, Standing Rock.
I didn't find a good explanation why OP thinks this is because of the lack of Social Technology though.
I imagine the salary difference in the solar and construction industries are similar. Also the cost of land, high taxes, safety and environmental regulations, and other external factors that are less of an issue in third-world countries.
Its simply not feasible to compare the cost of living and the cost of capital projects in one of the world's richest countries compared to one of its poorest. The same way you can't compare the cost of manufacturing domestically to manufacturing in, say, Vietnam where factory workers get paid $200 a month. Factory wages in the US are around $42.82/hour.
http://thehigherlearning.com/2015/04/09/u-s-factory-workers-...
What I hope is that early adopters are not penalised so much by this fact. Ie. that panels are easily swappable (scaffolding and the rest can stay as is; maybe batteries need to be swapped) and there will be marked for old, less efficient panels (and used batteries?) to be sold to late adopters or subsidised recycling?
You'd pay 75% less per watt of panel capacity today compared to 7 years ago, due to manufacturing improvements up and down the supply chain plus brutal market competition between manufacturers. That is a dramatic change.
Module price per watt is about 50 cents right now IIRC and would have been something like $1.25 when Topaz was built. Labor and installation is obviously more expensive in California than India.
Just to put things into perspective:
- A plant like Topaz, California generates ~1100 GWh/year. [3]
- "India was the third top electricity producer in the world 1272 TWh in FY 20014-15" [1]
- "India was the third top coal producer in 2015 with 283.9 Mtoe (7.4% global share)." [1]
- "Nearly 80% of total electricity generated (utility and captive) in India is from coal." [1]
So we're about at 3 orders or magnitude, in terms of generated electricity, between what you currently get from coal plants and this new Tamil Nadu plant. While the penetration rate of renewables is faster than coal [2], the same thing cannot be said of generated capacity. Globally an unit of power from renewables has a far lower EROI compared to Coal [4].
So I support what kumarski said below, this is much of a hype. If India wants to be serious about climate change, they should at least stop building Coal plants.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_India
[2] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Renewables- Are-Outpacing-Coal-in-India
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm
[4] http://festkoerper-kernphysik.de/Weissbach_EROI_preprint.pdf
US and Europe's path to prosperity went through Coal and to demand Indians and Chinese sacrifice while not making any thing substantial themselves (i.e. in US and Europe) is hypocrisy.
Indian population : 16% of world pop US population : 5% of world pop
Just one more stat for perspective.
Also Europe and US had a much smaller population than India during the industrial revolution and we can imagine that the pollution produced during those years was significantly lower than the pollution produce by china and India (hopefully some technology advances made this point wrong); in a finite world this does makes a difference.
Finally I am not sure how well know were the implications of environmental pollution during the industrial revolution; for sure such implications weren't well know as they are today.
Granted it is a complex problem and tradeoffs will be necessary, however claim that the western world did the same is not a good motivation to destroy the environment.
Well, there's nothing preventing EU and US from atoning for those mistakes by paying for Solar installations in India. So why don't they?
Anyhow, western countries do not have enough resource to finance clean energy in India. Or, at least, there are more pressing issue from the point of view of the average elector/citizen.
Then they should refrain from advising India on it's energy program. The biggest polluter, after China, is the United States and the EU. Emission per capita is 16.5t and 6.7t in comparison to India's 1.8t. That is pretty crazy considering that the population of US is not even 1/3rd of India. If US isn't serious about moving to clean energy why would India be?
Every country has "pressing issues" of it's own and that includes India as well. The country needs energy and lots of it. It would be great if moving to clean energy was faster and cheaper than setting up coal based plants. It's just not the case.
Even if India alone accomplished it's goal of 100% clean energy it won't stop climate change. Even though I like some of Trump's policies I don't think he is correct when it comes to US contribution to fixing the climate issues. He has already said that he will be pulling out of Paris climate deal. That means not only will US back out of funding third-world countries in tackling climate change, it will itself not move towards clean energy at the pace it would have. If US does back out of the deal, forget reversing global warming and achieving the 2 degree celsius magic number.
Coastal villages being flooded with sea water is definitely a big concern. That is the direct impact of climate change and the only way to fix it is reducing CO2 emissions. However, the fix for it doesn't lie with India alone. India produces only 1.8t of emissions per capita. US, China, EU have to take the lead. Only then will it have any meaningful impact. With the US threatening to back out of Paris climate deal, the silver lining that existed for reversing/stopping climate change is at the verge of disappearing. Trump's climate change denial is going to cost the World dearly. It may not affect you and I today, but the impact will definitely be felt by future generations.
Regardless of whether hypocracy is involved, wanting India and China to avoid the mistakes the West made is entirely reasonable. If nothing else, the US and Europe built coal plants before better technologies were available. India has access to modern natural gas plants, fuel cells, wind, solar, etc if it wants them. No one would suggest that India or China build lots of steam engines, after all.
Building steam engines and maintaining them was more expensive than building fuel based / electric trains. Even the initial cost was less. So the transition was faster and made a lot of economic sense.
Solar energy prices dropped to around parity with coal for the first time this year, hitting 4.34 rupees (about 6 US cents) a kilowatt-hour (kWh), while coal tariffs range usually range in between 3–5 rupees/kWh (about 5–8 US cents). It wasn't possible until April of this year to even consider Solar a viable alternative. With prices dropping (and hopefully continuing to drop until at least 2030) we can now think of installing new power plants backed by solar.
However, what happens to the old coal based power plants that power 20% of Indian populace (that is close to 3/4th of the population of the United States)? It is going to be super expensive to transition those old power plants to solar. Also, what about 24/7 power? Solar power plants don't guarantee 24/7 power. So you can't completely get rid of coal plants anyways. India has to do quite a bit of balancing act to provide energy for it's 1.3 billion and growing population.
It's not as easy as you make it out to be. If that was the case, United States would have already transitioned to 100% clean energy like it did with steam engines in the 19th-20th century.
Look at the first graph here (and ignore predictions in orange) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/25/renewabl...
Think of this graph next time you hear that climate change is a chinese hoax and despair
Actually completing the project so much cheaper than Topaz (for whatever reasons) gives hope and it's great news.
I wonder how far are we from situation where investing into solar farm project is genuinely a very good deal? Are we there yet?
Solar farms (I believe) can scale slowly even after being operational.
I may be wrong but it's also likely that deeper analysis of the cost for solar doesn't look that bad as you're probably spending most, if not all of the money on your own people - giving jobs and pouring money back in, not out of the country.
India's most recently grid connected reactor, Kudankulam-2, took 14 years to complete: https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.a...
Expected costs for the next 2 units at the same site are $5.91 billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant
That's $3.58 per real annualized watt assuming 90% capacity factor. If this new solar farm operates at 27% capacity factor (like Topaz did in 2015) that will be $3.88 per real annualized watt. So nuclear is still cheaper than solar in India in terms of construction costs. That might be offset by higher O&M costs; in the US at least, PV O&M costs come to $25/kilowatt/year while nuclear is $198/kilowatt/year: http://www.power-technology.com/features/featurepower-plant-...
Again adjusting for capacity factor (PV 27%, nuclear 90%), that means spending about $220/kilowatt/year on nuclear O&M and $93/kilowatt/year on PV O&M. I wouldn't expect the absolute numbers to be the same in India but the ratios may still be similar.
I'd say that the instantaneous generation costs for solar and nuclear projects that start generating in India now or next year are going to be pretty close. In the future, nuclear still has the advantage of working around the clock. But if the next 14 years see even a modest fraction of the solar cost reductions of the past 14 years, the next Kudankulam unit to come online will be far more expensive per annualized watt than a solar farm completed at the same time. 10 years ago it was a lot easier to figure out the lowest cost mix; nuclear power was cheaper than utility scale solar always and everywhere. It will be an interesting balancing act, in India and elsewhere, to determine just how much cheap-but-intermittent power you can use instead of expensive-but-steady power.
EDIT: I might have overestimated how well nuclear power performs in India. I assumed 90% capacity factor but it looks like all but one of India's nuclear reactors have a cumulative capacity factor below 80%. Kudankulam-1 was at 40% last year: https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.a...
WTF.
If future Indian reactors continue to operate at dreadful capacity factors like this, a new utility scale PV plant is already cheaper per real annualized watt.
Mr. Piyush Goyal is India's energy minister, and he's damn good. And, he knows what he's doing.
You'd actually expect something like 648 * 365 * 24 * .27 = 1.5 TWh/year.
Is it reasonable to assume that a solar power plant will operate at peak capacity 24 hours per day? (hint: what happens to its output during night hours?)
But in practice, this is mitigated by the actual power grid, another plant(s) somewhere else would take over at night. On a coal plant it is harder to adjust the load factor on the fly, it is not instantaneous. On a gas plant or a hydro dam, it is a matter of minutes, the turbines can start very quickly. That's why usually when such utility-scale renewable plants are installed, they need to be paired with another load-following plant, such as gas. Nevertheless, a renewable+gas/coal plant means less CO2 emissions, so I guess it's a good thing.
In other words, that's a 125MW plant, 5 times lower capacity than the new Indian one. https://lmgtfy.com/?q=1100+GWh%2Fyear+in+MW
Can you explain how it's relevant for this story context? For comparison, a typical coal power plant is 500MW. The new Indian plant is a real first step toward coal capacity replacement.
EDIT: BTW, the article cites Topaz's nominal (or max?) capacity at 550MW; that means its real capacity is 4-5 times lower. I didn't even realize the turndown due to sunlight (un)availability was so high.
For a solar plant like this one, the capacity is about at ~25%. If it was 100%, for a 650MW plant, you would get 650 * 365 * 24 = 5694 TWh / year. In practice, you will get 5694 * .25 = 1423 TWh / year.
If this was a nuclear plant, you would get 5694 * .90 = 5124 TWh / year. Continously, day and night. Without back-end storage required. Big difference.
And the US was the second top coal producer, at 50% more coal produced and while also using 96% of the coal that India used in the same time.
>"Nearly 80% of total electricity generated (utility and captive) in India is from coal."
If 80% of the electricity in India is generated from coal and America used 96% of the coal of India in the same time period, and America generates 22% of energy from coal and 71% from all fossil fuels[1] why is this hype?
The plant is far more effective to reduce India's use of fossil fuels than any solar plant that has been installed in the United States.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
USA -- whaat ?
As prices continue to drop there'll be less and less incentive for them to continue installing polluting power.
The choice of words and numbers have made it plausible for an 'us' versus 'them' scenario. You do have to give credit to the wing of the PR machine that runs this so effectively.
Going forward, controlling the narrative, and the associated "baseline" on geopolitical issues is going to be huge. Western countries have an unparalleled advantage thanks to the English and other Euro-languages which can reach a large portion of the globe.
It could be cool if you could provide a reference for this statement (both because I don't know what the current best source of such information is and because the climate discussion is entirely dependent on scientific research).
If west starts talking in terms of per capita consumption instead of per country consumption, the reality will smack them in the face and get them moving. But they don't.
That could power 82 Doc Brown DeLorean time machines[1].
In comparison, the 2013 estimate for world energy consumption was 12.3 terawatts[2], which would power 10165 Doc Brown DeLorean time machines.
A fan or open windows are likely to replace central heating/aircon, a bicycle or public transport a car, a radio a television, and locally sourced wood-fired stoves electricity and gas in the kitchen.
Your global 'energy consumption' figure probably includes stupid things like American industrial agriculture, Dubai, the US military, people's calories from food, ~free geothermal power in volcanic zones, established hydropower, etc.
The UAE as a whole only consumes 15% more energy per capita than the US. Given how much smaller it's population is (around the size of NYC), it seems unfair to include it in the list. I assume that number also includes how much energy is needed to produce oil, which is exported worldwide.
The country is heavily investing in renewables, Dubai wants to supply 7% of power by solar from 2020, and 75% by 2050.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... (sort 2013 by capita)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Arab...
That said, the US is a pretty bad yardstick. Another way to look at it would be to say that the average UAE citizen uses 250% of what an Iranian uses, or the average Qatar citizen uses 650% of what an Iranian uses, despite a (very) broadly similar climate and self-sufficient energy production.
The US citizen uses 11x more than an Indian, who is only slightly ahead of a North Korean (despite a horrific climate), both of whom are ~3x more than a Bengali.
Just curious how much raw material( water, etc, even waste ) went into building all that panels and the auxiliar stuff.
There is an ecological construction cost in any kind of power plant.
Regardless, this is still pretty awesome and my (limited) understanding of India suggests that it has the kind of climate that would really let this shine (pun intended).
Technology has advanced a lot since Homer got out of the lead suit. A lot of nations just refuse to use said technology out of fears that there will be another Chernobyl (human error and poor maintenance) or Fukishima. Fukishima is a very real danger, but partially avoidable through contained systems [0] and a comparable threat for other power plant models)
Yes, you will eventually have some waste. But nowhere near as much as we used to. And there have been quite a few studies (and "common sense") to indicate that greenhouse gas emissions are MUCH MUCH lower [1] than most of the alternatives.
So it is a tradeoff. Obviously solar/wind/geothermal/hydro [2] are the best choices where feasible. But if you can't use those reliably in a manner that is able to provide required energy at all hours of the day (including peak usage), you are stuck with dirty approaches. And of those, nuclear is pretty gosh darned "clean".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small,_sealed,_transportable,_...
[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-basics/greenhouse-gas-e...
[2] Hydro actually tends to cause a lot of problems for wildlife and the like. Not aware of any drawbacks for the other three though
I'm from Germany and since our Chancellor closed down this disastrous technology, those who were running it try to get rid of that shiny radioactive material and they can't (instead they are creating sub companies who's products are green energy). Now Germany and me will have to pay for it to disappear. Maybe France will take it. With their old and crappy plants some more leakage from the processing plants won't show.
Or maybe we can sell it to China. At some point they may pay a lot for it. Or we just wait for Trump to start a new cold war. I've read this stuff is good for weapons.
Unfortunately our Country is not as big as the US or Russia so the usual dig and forget won't work.
Wow...I mean..this technology was good at some point in our history for different reasons. But that point has passed. We did not come up with good solutions for the plants or the waste. I don't see any reason to INVEST in this. It's like investing in coal again.
Because your government said reprocessing was not allowed, there is now an excess of nuclear material. Ergo, reprocessing is a bad technology
Thank you for illustrating my point. The tech is sound. Getting past the fearmongers and actually using it is the problem. We have had some ridiculously safe reactors for decades, we just aren't allowed to build or use them anywhere. We have ways to deal with waste, but we aren't allowed to do it... and then get yelled at for having excess waste.
Seriously. Put your prejudices and patriotism at the door and actually do some research on the subject. Yes, a lot of this hasn't been tested at scale (in large part because politicians and Activists won't let anyone) but they have been researched VERY heavily, tested at varying scales, and are a more viable alternative than anything else right now. But because there is a "nuclear" in the name, it is inherently evil and wrong.
> We have had some ridiculously safe reactors for decades, we just aren't allowed to build or use them anywhere.
Why should you? The same thing has been said about those xx years old ones who threaten our lives east and west of Germany while we have so much green energy that we have to sell it.
> We have ways to deal with waste, but we aren't allowed to do it...
Yeah but those ways suck. They are bad for the environment and they cost a hell lot of money those who ran the plants don't want to pay for: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/kosten-atommuell-101.html
> Seriously. Put your prejudices and patriotism at the door and actually do some research on the subject.
I got the fallout of Tszarnobyl in east Poland as a child and Fukushima on a trip in Tokyo. Spare your idiotic propaganda about how safe this last century technology is supposed to be. It's dead and the sooner the nations who still base their electricity output on it recognize this, the better for the whole humankind.
Because your government said reprocessing was not allowed because they base their decisions on decades old technology and ignore any advances, there is now an excess of nuclear material. Ergo, reprocessing is a bad technology
Aside from that: If anyone who can avoid calling people "idiotic" and cares to read (I addressed the Chernobyl and Fukishima issues) wishes to continue discussion, feel free. I would love to. But I don't really see a point with this person though.
You've adressed Fukushima and Czarnobyl? Are you kidding me? You swiped that away saying one was a human error like this would never happen again and the other could be solved by some technology that didn't even come up with a prototype somewhere in the past and the development on it stopped 2015. It's in the link you've posted!
And you wonder why word like "idiotic" come up...besides the fact that you've started the insulting first of course.
I'd be astonished if it wasn't clearly the least impactful.
What the world needs is easier ability to compare true impact of building, and running our stuff. Without all the hidden externalities and hidden subsidies.
Nuclear is a close third with waste included for ecological foot print including waste. Its a $$$ game that Nuclear losses.
http://www.nei.org/News-Media/News/News-Archives/Nuclear-Pow... (Has a strong bias towards nuclear)
Nature article shows its the money and lead time that kills nuclear.
"Add to that the high costs and long lead times for building a nuclear plant about $3 billion for a 1,000 megawatt plant, with planning, licensing and construction times of about 10 years and nuclear power is even less appealing." (2008)
And now the cheap cost of solar and other alternative energy shows that it makes financially cense to use renewable over traditional carbon fuels.
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0810/full/climate.2008.99...
http://energypost.eu/battery-storage-will-take-backup-power-...
In the next 10 years batteries will have a larger role and about 25% of coal power plants will be retired by 2020 in US and Europe.
If these regulations were updated to require less polluting peaker plants, nuclear might be the only option because the economics are government mandated. I wouldn't be surprised if California started moving this direction by 2050 if it can give up the Nat gas addiction.
Yeah. I tried to create a (potential) transaction-oriented economic 'markup' system a few years ago... http://www.ifex-project.org/our-proposals/ifex ... despite some early interest via the IRTF, it never received any other developers and my then-employer asked me to focus elsewhere. The idea was basically that you built a risk model and then formally described enough properties of a potential transaction to enable automated routing of transactions even across multi-hop, multi-settlement-system, multi-asset topologies. I'd be willing to pick it up again as a group if anyone wanted to combine efforts.
I came around to the area because we were building a crypto-currency exchange (Kraken) and the availability (24x7x365) and risk management (re: gray settlement periods, exchange rate exposure, per-transaction and/or per-subsystem critical failure scenarios) profiles were therefore fairly extreme. It occurred to me that a decently generic solution in this space was not limited to conventional or digital assets and could apply with equal utility to physical goods and services.
Everything I've done since I have always regretted not finishing that project because I felt it would have been useful. This strongly suggests to me that there really is an opportunity to produce something in this space for wide adoption.
Here's one of the top results of a search I just did, which seems like a good start for those interested: A Comparative Analysis of Energy Costs of Photovoltaic, Solar Thermal, and Wind Electricity Generation Technologies [1] - this is a 2013 meta-analysis of life-cycle assessments (LCA) and life-cycle energy costs (LCEC) in kWhe/Wp and kWhe/We - these are split into both capex and opex.
Here's another study from 2012, The Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) of Photovoltaics: Methodology and Comparisons with Fossil Fuel Life Cycles [2] that gives a chart w/ comparison to coal & oil energy - looks like plants w/ all PV types have better EROI than oil-fired electricity, and the best performing PV has EROI of about 12, on par w/ the worst performing coal-fired electricity (an EROI of 1 is breakeven btw).
Ah, just find this 2015 review: Energy payback time (EPBT) and energy return on energy invested (EROI) of solar photovoltaic systems: A systematic review and meta-analysis [3] which actually might be the best paper I've seen yet. It looks like EROI for solar is actually growing tremendously as volume/learning rate advancements are applied.
If I'm reading the chart correctly, EPBT (energy payback time) for mono-Si is approaching 2 years (the time of which has been decreasing with each newer study) as more panels/plants are getting built.
(Interesting, this paper [4] from 2000 seems to correctly project payback times: "At present the energy payback time for PV systems is in the range 8 to 11 years, compared with typical system lifetimes of around 30 years. About 60% of the embodied energy is due to the silicon wafers. As the PV industry reduces production costs and moves to the use of thin film solar cells the energy payback time will decline to about two years.")
[1] PDF: http://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/3/2/325/pdf
[2] PDF: http://www.clca.columbia.edu/241_Raugei_EROI_EP_revised_II_2...
[3] PDF: http://astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~relling2/PDF/pubs/life_cycl...
And it's much cheaper and easier to install a ton of panels at once, then one and one on rooftops with varying size and design. It' also easier and cheaper to keep them clean.
But one does not rule out the other. The world should probably invest massively in both kinds of solar, since solar at rooftops with battery storage can help reduce the burden on the grid (especially when people start to need electricity to charge cars).
This is, IMHO, why we should make it a priority to put PV on large commercial / industrial / institutional buildings. Double use of land, serious economies of scale, a maintenance organization already accustomed to dealing with rooftop infrastructure, and a ready customer for the produced energy (which means storage, transmission, and buy-back schemes may not be necessary at all) all together.
Like this: http://www.dlrgroup.com/work/mandalay-bay-solar-array/
Or maybe it's just the number of floors. My parents' rooftop solar installation covers about 100% of their annual usage. But it's a two story house with a basement. Mandalay Bay is significantly taller on average.
[1] https://gpcl.gujarat.gov.in/showpage.aspx?contentid=110
[2] http://bescom.org/en/solar-roof/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru_National_Sola...
According to Wolfram Alpha, 1kg of mass contains about 10^17 joule. Let's see how much Kg earth has... about 10^25. So earth contains about 10^42 Joule?
According to a quick googling around, the sunlight that reaches us contains about 10^20 Joules per day.
So hey, if we burn up everything we can outdo the sun for 10^19 years!
(In other words, transforming one kg of matter to energy releases 9*10^16 J of energy, equivalent to burning 2.6 million ton of coal.)
As far as I know, the most physically realistic way of transforming matter to energy involves throwing it into a black hole and capturing the incoming radiation. So... I'll bet it won't be commercially available any time soon.
The issue of it being densely populated land would have been valid if this was near some major city and plant actively hampered development. There probably is no such issue now, the plant provides cleaner energy than the alternative (coal), and is a huge step forward towards reducing the country's need for non-renewable sources.
I promise you that at night we burn 50% ash - lignite coal to compensate for downticks in solar and upticks in consumption.
For the next few years we'll be opening a new coal plant each month.
To give you an idea of how far we are behind as an energy grid.
The US & China each Produce about 4000 Terawatt Hours Per a Year.
India is somewhere in the ~1500 Terawatt hours per a year.
To make up the difference we're going to burn a ton of coal, the worst kind of coal.
[1] https://www.alt-m.org/2016/11/28/indias-currency-cancellatio...
So yeah, we're going to burn a ton, or two of coal, and keep building Solar power plants.
To be fair, I applaud the efforts being taken, however, pretending that the problems don't even exist is what's unfortunate.
[1] http://www.ndtv.com/delhi-news/smouldering-mountains-of-garb...