India has a novel idea: Wean farmers from archaic power lines and expensive diesel fuel to run their water pumps with solar energy.
The government is looking to swap 26 million groundwater pumps for more efficient irrigation models powered by the sun.
Bloomberg newsagency reports if successful, crop production could rise in India, where farms suffer from blackouts and volatile fuel costs.
It would also save about US$6 billion a year in power and diesel subsidies.
A number of companies are targeting the market including Asia’s top irrigation-equipment maker Jain Irrigation Systems, Claro Energy, whose investors include Standard Chartered Managing Director Arun Singhal, and the solar unit of the Tata group, India’s biggest conglomerate.
“The potential is huge,” Tarun Kapoor, joint secretary at India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said in an interview.
“Irrigation pumps may be the single largest application for solar in the country.”
Bloomberg reports Asia’s second-most populous nation will draw US$1.6 billion of investment in the next five years as the first 200,000 most easily replaceable pumps are switched to solar, the government estimates.
That will relieve an overburdened power-transmission grid built mostly in the 1960s that’s prone to failures.
A risk in converting to solar pumps is that farmers may use excessive amounts of water because the devices have almost no operating costs.
To avoid that, farmers must use water-saving drip irrigation in exchange for accepting subsidies to buy solar water pumps.
The new water reliability from a technology that moves away from older energy sources will allow farmers to plant extra crop.
Using fossil fuel-based power to pump well, canal and farm water also contributes to climate change, said Aaron Mandell, chairman of WaterFX, which sells solar desalination technology.
Let’s “break the link between carbon-based fuels and additional water production,” Mr Mandell said.
“The best way to do this is for the water industry to begin to take advantage of the cost reductions that have already occurred in renewable energy.”
The cost of photovoltaic panels that have slumped by half since 2010 and government subsidies mean the payback period of a solar pump system is one to four years, said Ajay Goel, chief executive officer of Tata Power Solar Systems, a panel maker and contractor that belongs to the US$100 billion Tata group, which has businesses including steel, software services and vehicles.
Bloomberg reports the government funds in some states as much as 86 per cent of the cost of solar pump systems that in the long run save money because they eliminate US$6 billion in annual farm diesel and electricity subsidies, according to Mr Kapoor.
That aid helped nudge India’s current-account deficit to a record last year.
The economics will only get better as diesel prices rise and scale brings more efficiencies, eliminating the need for state support, said Stephan Grinzinger, head of sales for Lorentz Vertriebs, a German maker of solar water pumps.
“Because of the drop in photovoltaic prices, globally we’re selling more solar pumps without subsidies than with,” Mr Grinzinger said.
The change comes as production of mainstay crops like wheat, corn and rice stagnate in India, according to a 2012 study of nearly five decades of yield data published by the journal Nature Communications.
The reasons included water scarcity and falling groundwater tables.
Farmers needing cash for diesel will often promise their harvest upfront to pay for the fuel, agreeing to low prices for their crops.
As water demand rises during the growing season, diesel prices spike on the black market.
In 2012, farmers were forced to run electric pumps after a bad monsoon contributed to the world’s biggest blackout that left almost 360 million people in the dark for days, according to the World Resources Institute.
About eight million diesel pumps already in use could be replaced economically now, said Pashupathy Gopalan, SunEdison’s regional head. The ministry’s Kapoor estimates another 700,000 diesel pumps are bought every year in India that could be displaced with solar.
“Solar pumping may have far-reaching impacts on agriculture in India, where monsoon rains dictate sowing cycles of crops such as rice, soybeans and peanuts, said Avinash Kishore, an associate research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in New Delhi.
In the fertile east, solar pumping could reduce floods and boost rice and wheat harvests, said Tushaar Shah, a senior fellow at Colombo, Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute.
In water-stressed regions including Rajasthan, home to the biggest state solar-pump program, the project is unique in scale, with larger private farmers looking to exchange grid and diesel systems.
