Before we close 2016 and wish each other good luck for the coming year, we should first celebrate the great year that went past. Human beings need closures to move on. While closures can sometimes be tough and unpleasant, for me closures are pleasant. For me 2016 was a good year. Welcome episodes of amnesia ensure that all bad events in the year are wiped out of my consciousness. Being an eternal optimist, I tend to look at the past with a smile of gratitude. I want to do that now, and recall all the good events that I wrote in this column through the year.
The year started off with the news that India reached solar parity in many states, and net metering systems have been set up and running well. We celebrated the emergence of the 'prosumer', where the consumer of electricity is also the producer of electricity. This was followed by the birth of the 3rd age of electric mobility. We recounted the golden words of William McDonough, when he said 'The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live'. We are not running out of oil, but we saw the surge of non-polluting electric transportation from Tesla, Mahendra, Ashok Leyland and many others. India's Minister Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy, Piyush Goyal, told a youth conference of the goal of having 100 percent of the vehicles in India powered completely by electricity by the year 2030.
On the back of all the noise of the silent electric cars, an electric helicopter developed by Martine Rothblatt, flew at 400 feet for five minutes at speeds of 80 knots quietly.
Gibraltar made history with the connection of its new wave power project, an array of ocean energy converters. Though small in size, it was the first clean power plant of its kind in the EU, and the first grid-connected, multi-unit wave power plant in Europe to operate under the terms of a commercial power purchase agreement. Following this, the world's first large-scale tidal stream energy farm went live in the north coast of Scotland, with the project aiming to install 269 turbines in hopes of having a capacity of 398 MW, enough to power 175,000 homes.
In the middle of the year, on 30th June, the journal Science reported that the ozone layer has healed! 1985 was the year when the ozone hole was seen as a symbol of the harm that we human beings can cause to the environment. So the news of its healing, came as a big relief. Like the super-efficient ants in an ant colony, for the first time we human beings displayed eusocialty, with Kofi Annan saying "perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date has been the Montreal Protocol".
November 4th was a date that got etched in history, when containing climate change and implementing low-carbon energy became international law, with 98 countries representing 70% of global emissions, ratifying the Paris agreement domestically. General Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary, summed up the event in very poignant terms: "We are the first generation to really feel the effects of climate change-and the last that can prevent its worst consequences. Today shows us what is possible when we join forces for our common future."
The year ended with a bang when India threw open the world's biggest solar power plant. The 648-megawatt capacity Kamuthi Solar Power Project in Tamil Nadu is bigger than the Topaz Solar Farm in California which has a capacity of 550-megawatts. With 2.5 million solar panels, cleaned daily by solar-powered robots, the Kamuthi Solar Power Project was built in 8 months at a cost of $679, and will power 150,000 homes.
Wow…! What a year 2016 has been, packed with great events that have changed the course of mankind for ever. Now I am ready to welcome 2017, with all the goodness it has in store for us! Happy New year!
