Our online tools will change the way you see solar and wind energy in India: Jai Asundi, Executive Director, CSTEP

Jai Asundi spoke to indianexpress.com on the challenges of clean air monitoring in India, issues around stubble burning, the huge potential for solar and wind power in India, and the emerging ecosystem around air quality in India. Edited excerpts:

Venkatesh Kannaiah: What is your work on low-cost air monitoring sensors and what do you hope to achieve?

Jai Asundi: We work on the proof of concept to test the viability of low-cost sensors to measure/monitor air pollution in India. We have done such work in Bengaluru along with our international partners. The issue is that research/regulatory grade equipment is expensive and it cannot be used in large numbers, say in their thousands to track air quality across a city.

Our work is to check the performance of various varieties of low cost sensors, and suggest ways to calibrate and use them. Our finding is that not all sensors are the same. We are also exploring with our collaborators on the spatial aspect of air pollution, putting up air sensors to identify hotspots, and mounting these sensors on vehicular platforms. Our goal is to test a city-wide, dense, low-cost sensor network.

We also work with Google Earth Engine on a few bluesky ideas to explore how we could use their platform for climate adaptation issues.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about your Rooftop Solar Explorer Tool. How does it work, where is it used, and what are the results.?

Jai Asundi: This is a tool to estimate the potential of solar power even for a standalone single house or an apartment. It is like a Google Maps tool where you can zoom onto your house and estimate the solar potential on your rooftop. We have built the tool with a database of potential sunlight in various locations across the city or the state over a period of time. We can estimate with a level of certainty the solar power potential on your rooftop, and how much you can earn by installing a solar panel. The tool can also take into account if your neighbouring building is taller and if it is throwing a shadow on your building. It is both for citizens and for government officials to estimate solar power potential. The tool is available in Bengaluru and for five cities in the state of Madhya Pradesh where the pilots have been conducted.

We did this survey in Bengaluru over a 1100 square kilometre area, for a period of four years, using a helicopter. It is considered as an unique experiment, as others like Google have used aircraft for cities in the US. We did it with airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology and helicopters. Now, such surveys have become cheaper with drones.

As of now, the overall rooftop solar potential across the country is to the tune of 110 GW, but India has installed perhaps somewhere in the region of 10-12GW. We are looking to get this tool to various states and hope to get more people and more governments to use this. There is a large ecosystem which can benefit from such a tool.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us more about CSTEP, its focus, inspiration and the journey.

Jai Asundi: It was the dream of Dr V S Arunachalam, a former director of DRDO, to build an organisation outside the government to be focussed on issues where science and technology plays a major role in development. You must understand that the challenges around 2005, when the organisation was visualised, were very different. We were facing power cuts then, and the question was on how to meet our energy needs. Hence energy was taken up as the first challenge.

Secondly, we were also seeing the trajectory of advanced economies going from fossil fuels to renewable sources. We were also questioning ourselves whether we should follow that route.

During 2009, the organisation worked on the IT for the Power Sector Report and this work indirectly led to power sector reforms in the 2014 era. During 2017-18, there was an increased focus on air quality, with applied research and policy focussed research taking a bulk of the time.

Now the focus is on three grand challenges: Clean energy transition, clean air, and the work looking at development from a climate and sustainability lens. We work on atmospheric measurement, modelling and policy engagement with the government, apart from technology assessment on new tech like Energy storage, Hydrogen and carbon capture. We work closely with the government on articulating their positions with research in the various long-term issues that are discussed at COP summits on climate.

We are also unique in the sense that we look into the second order effects of some of the renewables like solar panel recycling and its effect on land, air and water.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: What does your SiteRight tool do? What is the utility?

Jai Asundi: SiteRight is a tool for estimating the availability of large parcels of land which could be used to build solar and wind farms. Based on earlier data on sunlight, physical features in a particular region, the tool estimates the potential of these large solar and wind farms. This tool also takes into consideration the wind patterns over the years to estimate wind energy potential. We also estimate how far the transformer/sub-station is from a particular piece of land and whether the grid there could take the load. It provides a bird eye view for easier decision making.

In due course, this tool can also estimate the ongoing projects of the large solar farms in India, whether they have been installed and functioning. This tool has also incorporated the ecological and societal aspects of the land that has been surveyed, for example if it is forest land or temple land. This tool is now available all over India.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: What is the nature of your work in Punjab? What have been your learnings with relation to stubble burning?

Jai Asundi: We are working on management of air quality in Punjab. Our work is on measurement, modelling and raising awareness among citizens on air quality issues. Our current reading of the situation is that there is no one-stop Tech solution to resolving the stubble burning issue. There are some tech solutions available like the Happy Seeder machine which takes the stubble and replants it in the ground. There is a logistics issue here. All of this weeding and replanting needs to be done in a small time window. Even for transportation of stubble, this is the issue. The window is very short. No farmer will buy a machine which will be used for just a few days in a year.

The way for it to be resolved as per our research is firstly, a change in cropping patterns of the farmers and moving away from rice, transport of the stubble to other regions for further processing and pelletising of the stubble or use of technologies that put the stubble back into the soil. It is a mix of all three that can be used, but it is not a problem that is going to go away very soon.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: As a member of the climate modelling forum of NITI Aayog, what do you do?

Jai Asundi: Around 2013 we had approached the Union govt to do energy modelling for India and for our energy and climate projections in various international fora. This has evolved into a coalition of ecosystem players from other think tanks in India to build a consensus on the modelling aspects of our energy transition. Each one of us might be using different energy and climate models, which give different perspectives of the same problem, but we need to agree on the basic assumptions on which such modelling is being done. It is a good example of how collaboration across institutions works.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: With the Clean Air Action plan in 70 cities, what is your role?

Jai Asundi: With the Clean Air Action Plan, we are building emission inventories for 70 of the 120 odd cities. This involves examining the sources of emissions for modelling of action plans. Our work is focused on 70 cities across India where we have built an inventory of all possible options and see the possibilities for policy action on the same. We share the same with local authorities and pollution control boards for them to take action. Air quality in many cities is much below the standards that we have set for ourselves, and our role is of a knowledge builder in this space.

We also try to bring the air quality ecosystem in India together with the India Clean Air Summit. Last year we co-hosted The Air Sensors International Conference, a popular conference in the US for tracking developments in sensor tech. With ICAS, we are looking at building an ecosystem for sharing knowledge on clean air challenges in India across academia, industry and policy circles.