What is claimed as ‘Clean’, may not necessarily be deemed as ‘Green’

The consumption of energy is increasing day by day and it is a well-established fact that fossil fuels are on the verge of depletion and as such may not be able to fulfill our ever-growing future energy demands. Hence, renewable energy sources, especially wind and solar energy is commonly perceived as the energy choice of the future owing to its cleaner production and environment friendly nature.

There is a global push towards installation and expansion of renewable energy and 192 countries across the world have already announced policies to promote renewable energy. India has also set ambitious renewable energy targets to almost triple its current installed renewable capacity from 59 GW to 175 GW by 2022. However, such a large scale shift to renewable energy comes with its own costs, causing significant impacts both on the people and the surrounding planet. But such projects are rarely critiqued on the ground of being clean and environment friendly source of energy. Thus in the backdrop of this, a study was undertaken to assess the various environmental and social impacts of solar and wind energy projects. These impacts were reviewed from the scientific literature and triangulated during the field visits while interning with The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

The wind power projects are generally sighted in hilly and forested areas. Many a times, large number of trees are felled for building the access roads and transmission lines. This issue is being entirely neglected since wind power projects are exempted from the ambit of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). It is alarming that huge tracts of forested lands are being diverted for setting up of wind farms without any EIA studies and as per the CSE report on “Green Norms for wind power” it is estimated that about 3,932 ha of forests have already been diverted for wind power projects. Besides this, there are instances where wind farms have resulted in high bird mortality and disturbed avian habitat.

A large-scale shift to solar energy underscores the urgency of understanding their environmental and socio-economic interactions. The solar farms require large tracks of contiguous land (one-two hectares per MW) and the availability of land is a contentious issue in a dense and populous country like India. Thus such projects come in conflict with the local communities and conservation interests. Solar farms are also very water intensive, approximately 110 milliliters of water per kilowatt hour is required for cleaning solar panels. Another cause of worry is the amount of hazardous and toxic e-waste that is generated out of the solar panels at the end of their life.

This is not to portray that the renewable energy projects should be discarded but to sensitise that a poor understanding of these impacts may cause a serious disaster in the long run, put question marks on the status of renewable energy as ‘Green Energy’ and eventually hinder the progress of renewable energy. Though, the environmental and social impacts of solar and wind energy systems is a controversial and debatable topic, but the seeds of the next energy economy must be sown now as the implications of today's decisions will influence India's energy future for decades.