If India’s Energy Woes Were America’s

India from space at night. Source: nightearth.com

I just returned from India, where the country’s energy predicament hits a visitor with great clarity. India is nothing like the United States: for one thing, it’s population of nearly 1.2 billion is almost four times larger than ours, and it has 18 official languages to our one. But what if India’s energy problems existed in America? The answer might help an American understand how energy-starved India really is.

An American visitor is most likely to start out in one of India’s biggest cities, such as Mumbai, New Delhi or Kolkata, where the electricity gulf between the two countries is mostly hidden. These large Indian cities have electricity 24/7 — but even that is not abundant. Drive at night through Chennai, the country’s fifth-largest city, and you’ll notice that the street lights are sparse and that entire office buildings are blacked out to save power. The smaller cities have a “peak deficit” of 12 percent, meaning that power outages are a daily occurrence.

To put this in the American context, this would mean that only perhaps seven cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia and San Antonio — could keep a refrigerator cold for 24 hours straight. The residents of dozens of other large cities and thousands of suburbs would experience several hours a day where the kitchen lights and A/C didn’t work, food spoiled, and the computer was dead.

In India, forty percent of the population is off the grid and has no electricity at all. This is due to the fact that the country is overwhelmingly rural — 72 percent of the population, compared to just over 20 percent in the U.S. Still, what would life be like in America if 40 percent of the population were in this predicament?

This part of the thought experiment is especially hard to get one’s mind around. This 40 percent of the population’s lack of electrical juice is almost total. We’re not talking the occasional blackout; in the Indian context, we’re talking about 460 million people who have never had any electricity, ever. That’s more people than live in the U.S., Canada and Mexico combined.

The United States from space at night. Source: nightearth.com

For light, most of these megamillions rely on kerosene lanterns. While inexpensive, these lanterns produce low-quality light, lots of dirty emissions, and are a constant risk for fire and burns, especially night after night in close quarters. For heat and cooking, the fuel comes from cheap or scavenged materials like firewood or dried cow dung.

To bring our comparison back to American shores, this would be as if the population of our six most populous states — California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania — were huddled in smoky huts in the dark. Not only would these people not have power; they would never have even used an electrical bulb.

Imagine how difficult it would be to do business — not to mention your laundry — in a country like that.