INDIA TOPS WITH US IN SOLAR POWER

MUMBAI: The green energy revolution is not miles away from India। The country has emerged as the world’s number one, along with United States, In annual solar power generation In wind power production, India ranks fifth in the world. And when it comes to space, scope and facilities for renewable energy expansion, India ranks fourth in the world. McKinsey & Company, in its survey ended in May 2009, has stated that India has one of the world’s highest solar intensities with an annual solar energy yield of 1,700 to 1,900 kilowatt hours per kilowatt peak (kWh/KWp) of the installed capacity. This is similar to the US and Hawaii, the two other countries which have been ranked first along with India. After India, US (mainly California state), Hawaii and Spain are the largest solar power producers with 1,500 to 1,600 kWh/KWp followed by Italy, Australia, China, Japan and Germany. Similarly, in the BP statistical review of world energy, India has been ranked as fifth in the world. While United States contributes 20.7% of the total wind energy in the world, Germany produces 19.6%, followed by Spain (14%), India (8%), China (6%) and Denmark (3%). According to Ernst & Young’s renewable energy country attractiveness indices, which ranks countries based on regulatory environment, fiscal support, unexploited resources, suitability to different technologies and other factors determining renewable energy growth in a country, India maintains a ranking within the top five countries in the world. Besides solar and wind, India’s index for development of renewable energy resources in hydropower sector is the fourth topmost in the world after US, Germany and China. Similarly, the country’s development index in biomass is ranked third in the world after US and Germany. Countries like Italy, UK, France, Canada and Australia lag behind India in this world index. “This implies enormous potential in energy generation running into several hundred Giga Watts with current solar technologies. As the cost of building solar capacity continues to fall over the next five to 10 years, a significant scale-up of solar generation (in multiples of tens of GW) is a very realistic possibility in India,’’ the McKinsey report stated. It further reveals that India’s biomass potential could be as high as 70 Giga Watts, bagasse 5 GW and agro-waste 18 GW. Use of wasteland for growing feedstock (woody biomass) is another potential source of biomass and a programme to cultivate such crops like poplars and cottonwoods on just a quarter of country’s 80 million hectares of degraded land, it could generate 45 to 50 GW of power. The Ernst & Young’s report stated that India’s gross renewable energy potential (up to 2032) is estimated at 220 GW. “Clearly, with a renewable energy capacity of 14.8 GW i.e, 9.7% of the total installed generation capacities of 150 GW (as on June 30, 2009), India has barely scratched the surface of a huge opportunity. However, given that in the last couple of years itself, the share of renewable energy in installed capacity has grown from 5% to 9.7%, India is definitely looking to make up for the lost time rapidly,’’ stated the report.

Origin of odd South American boulders may have defeated the Origin's author.

In June 1833, Charles Darwin asked the captain of the HMS Beagle to delay his departure from Tierra del Fuego so that he could study a strange group of granite boulders he had found on the coast at Bahía San Sebastián.

"[O]ne of these, shaped somewhat like a barn, was forty-seven feet in circumference and projected five feet above the sand beach," he later wrote. "There were many others half this size, and they all must have traveled at least ninety miles from their parent rock."

What made the boulders unusual was that, other than these 500 or so big rocks spread out in a long, banana-shaped region, there were no others in the vicinity. Darwin was puzzled. How did the boulders get there?

"Darwin is known mostly for evolution and natural selection," says Edward Evenson, a glacial geologist from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania — but his interests were broader. "Darwin considered himself a geologist," Evenson said yesterday at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.

Read more in Nature's Darwin 200 special.

In South America, mysterious rocks weren't all that Darwin found. He also saw beach-like landscapes, hundreds of metres above the present-day waters of the Pacific. He saw rocks embedded in glacial ice and heard at least one report of a rocky iceberg floating far out to sea.

The boulders, he concluded, had been scoured out of the mountains by glaciers that calved into the sea. The icebergs then ran aground, melted and dropped their rocky burdens on the seabed, where subsequent uplift raised them above the waves.

In a pickle

It was a good theory, but unfortunately, says Evenson, who recently revisited the site as part of a mapping project, it doesn't quite work. To begin with, he said, there is another, similar group of rocks at a place called Bahía Inútil. This group consisted of 1,000 large rocks, again spread over an elongated zone, whose outline Evenson this time compared to a pickle or gherkin, 8 kilometres long by 2 kilometres wide. "Darwin never saw these boulders," he said.

If both groups of rocks had been carried by icebergs, the icebergs must have been remarkably similar. Nevertheless, both sets of rocks were angular, indicating that they had been carried atop the ice, rather than bulldozed in front of it.

"Where do big angular boulders get onto glaciers today?" Evenson asked. "Rockslides." The shapes of the boulder fields were another clue: because glaciers flow more rapidly in their centre than at their edges, landslide debris tends to get stretched into ever-lengthening ellipses as it moves down a valley.

Finally, he said, the rock must have fallen onto the glacier somewhere above the zone where snow melts faster than it accumulates. That far up, Evenson said, glaciers tend to be concave, allowing rocks to slide far along their surfaces. Lower down, the glaciers are more likely to be convex, trapping rocks near the edges.

Putting all these clues together, Evenson was able to pinpoint the source of the rockfall to one of three locations, the most likely of which was beside a tributary called the Parry Glacier, 200 kilometres from the boulders' present locations.

When the flow of a roughly circular patch of rocks is modelled from that starting location, he said, "we get a pickle at Bahía Inútil and a banana at San Sebastián."

Other scientists were impressed. "It was quite convincing," says Kevin Padian, curator of the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley.

He notes, though, that Darwin wasn't completely wrong. "He had the general idea of where [the rocks] came from and what direction they were going, but he didn't realize they were carried by an ice field," Padian said. "He thought they were carried by icebergs."