Water in desert coolers

Summer season is standing next door. Fortunately, April has not been very hot this year controlling demand of desert coolers in hot and dry states like Rajasthan.

We approximately consume atleast 150-300 lt of water through evaporation in desert coolers. Recently (over past 2-3 years now) a new development has hit the market: two-stage evaporative coolers. This technology involves first stage as sensible cooling and the second stage of eveporative cooling, offering a reduction in water consumption as well as control on humidity which is a drawback of normal coolers.

I am yet to see domestic scale device of this type, though commercial scale devices are in the market. Also trying to make one here in MNIT through students to see its merits and limitations in small scale application. I strongly feel that this version of air coolers would change the HVAC industry and would be a threat to AC market.

Last week I was attending a workshop organized by Rajasthan pollution Control Board and GIZ (new name of GTZ, Germany), on climate change.

Results presented by some leading researchers on climate change indicated that in Rajasthan, and in many other parts of India, temperature would rise by about 1.5 to 2 degrees, and there would be an increase in rainfall. What is more important is that this more rainfall is likely to be confined in smaller period of time. Which indicates that use of rainwater harvesting system is going to play an important role if we don't want to let this precious rain water go into the drain. 'don't let rain go into the drain', should be objective and slogan.

It has been felt for past some time that there is really dirth of people in India having sufficient skills for designing solar thermal power plants. Those who have the skill set, keep it close to their chest due to the fear of loosing business opportunity if they share the knowledge with others.

On the other hand, government has already announced plans to accelerate the installation in solar thermal power sector. I suspect that with acute shortage of trained manpower, we would be hiring foreign consultants for designing our plant, who may not be well conversant with the local issues that sometimes significantly govern the design decisions.

This is not just going to result into less ROI as compared to the enviaaged one, more importantly, my fear is that this would spread a wrong message that solar energy is not economically harnessable through thermal power route.

In my opinion, educational institutions like NITs, IITs, should come forward and take part in capacity building in this area. If there are no or very few trainers, MNRE should get the trainers trained in leading labs worldwide, and then plunge into massive training spree.

Have fun till the sun lasts,
Jyotirmay Mathur

Embodied energy of high performance glass

During our ongoing training program on Energy Simulation of Buildings for LEED and ECBC at IIIT Hyderabad these days (Dec. 16-19, 2010), again some participants raised the point of high embodied energy in high performance glazing solutions.

I feel that due to lack of data regarding embodied energy, there is much hype getting generated against high performance glazing. People are releasing statements saying that such glass is not able to pay the energy invested in making itself through energy savings.

Some preliminary analysis has shown that the share of embodied energy in the entire life cycle energy of a building is less than 3% since over the life of about 40 years, operational energy is much more than embodied energy that is invested one time only.

We are doing detailed analysis of this topic to help the building sector understanding the correlation between the two, this would help in establishing the usefulness of high performance glazing.

In fact with this intent only we visited few glass manufacturing units in India, but manufacturers are little hesitant in releasing the data. We are trying to convince them that such analysis will help them and would not be going against then in any way. This would remove the mental blockage present in the building sector against extensive use of good glass.

Let us see how and when can we convince them and get the data.

Sign of climate change

During past recent days, western India has seen much rainfall, higher than ever before in winter season. I guess, this is due to climate change that is gradually taking place worldwide. Last winter in Europe was quite harsh with lot of snow fall, breaking records of several years. Due to this unexpected rain, temperature has gone down sharply, and heating energy demand has started little earlier as compared to normal years when it starts in December first or second week.

Enjoy the winters fruits, vegetables, bar-be-que and sitting in sun!

jyotirmay

Lighting with bulbs on Diwali

This Diwali again, lot of incandescent bulbs were seen in use for decorative lighting. Despite several appeals for not using the bulbs for decoration, most of the market associations and shopkeepers did not respond and continued using the same inefficient bulbs.

I think when we have surplus money, we become unconcerned about energy efficiency and other similar issues related to sustainability.

Since awareness campaigns and voluntary action is not working well in this field, government should ban use of incandescent lamps, especially for decorative lighting. It has to be done similar to the way polythene bags have been banned in Rajasthan.

Same action is required to curb the firing of crackers that pollute our environment like anything.

Jyotirmay

In India, Diwali, the festival of lights is coming close. On the name of celebration, many government buildings are illuminated using incandescent bulbs which is a huge wastage of energy.
Government should make a rule about maximum permissible energy per sqm of facade area for festival lighting.