THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 25 February
India building a supercomputer juggernaut
•Come June, India will likely unveil its most powerful supercomputer. If its processors operate at the full capacity of 10 petaflops (1 followed by 15 zeroes of floating point operations per second), a clock speed a million times faster than the fastest consumer laptops, it could earn a place among the world’s top 10 fastest supercomputers.
•Though India has built or hosted supercomputers since the 1990s, it held a ‘top 10’ spot only once, in 2007, thanks to the EKA built by the Computational Research Laboratories, which is part of the Tata group. This position was lost, though several ultra-fast machines exist in Indian academic institutions: they feature in the 100s or 200s in global rankings.
•The as-yet-unnamed machine will be jointly hosted at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting at Noida in Uttar Pradesh.
•For the first time, colleges and other research institutions can log in and harness its power to address problems, ranging from weather modelling to understanding how proteins fold. “The tender [to select the company that will build the machine] is ready and we hope to have it [the computer] by June” Madhavan Rajeevan, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences, told The Hindu.
400 crore sanctioned
•The government has sanctioned ₹400 crore for the project this year. Most of the machine’s computing power will help in monsoon forecasting, using a dynamical model. This requires simulating the weather for a given month — say March — and letting a custom-built model calculate how the actual weather will play out over June, July, August and September.
•The processing speed of supercomputers is only one of the factors that determine its worth, with power usage and arrangement of processors, being other key metrics that determine the worth of a system.
•Top500, the global authority tracking the fastest 500 computers, said in its latest report that China and the U.S. were “pacing each other for supercomputing supremacy.”
Plan to allow larger firms to shut shop sans govt. nod
•The Labour Ministry has proposed that factories with up to 500 workers be allowed to lay off workers or shut shop without seeking government permission, in a bid to give firms flexibility in hiring and firing employees.
•The Ministry is set to discuss the proposed Labour Code on Industrial Relations at the next meeting of the Group of Ministers (GoM), scheduled for March 8, a senior Ministry official said.
•The GoM is headed by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.
•At present, factories with up to 100 workers are allowed to go in for retrenchment, lay-off or closure without seeking government permission, according to the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947.
•“There has been demand from the industry to increase the threshold limit for factories to seek permission for retrenchment from 100 workers to 500 workers. We need to discuss the proposal with the GoM before taking a final call,” the official said.
Single code stalled
•In May 2015, the Labour Ministry had proposed integrating three labour laws — the Trade Unions Act, the Industrial Disputes Act and the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act — into a single code for industrial relations.
•It had then also proposed allowing factories with up to 300 workers to retrench workers or close down without seeking official sanction.
•However, the Centre had put the proposals on the back-burner after series of protests from the central trade unions on the proposed labour law reforms.
•The Labour Ministry may back its latest proposal to increase the threshold limit for applicability of chapter V-B of the Industrial Disputes Act, citing hard data from Sixth Economic Census report released last year.
•The data shows that around 99% of a total of 4.53 crore non-agricultural establishments employed less than 100 workers in 2013-14 and were allowed to retrench workers or close shut shop without government permission.
•“Most of the establishments in India needn’t take government permission to retrench workers or close their set up. So, the amendments will only impact a very small proportion of the total establishments in the country. But a political call needs to be taken on increasing the threshold limit for the I-D Act,” the official added.
Earlier attempts
•Till 1975, the requirement for prior permission was only for establishments with 1,000 workers that was decreased to 300 workers in 1976 during the Emergency and later brought down to 100 workers in 1982.
•The previous National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in 2002 had also proposed allowing factories with up to 1,000 workers to lay off workers without government permission. In 2005, the Centre had released a discussion paper titled ‘Making Labour Market Flexible’ for stakeholder discussions proposing an increase in the threshold limit for seeking permission for retrenchment or closure under the Act to 300 from 100 workers.
•However, subsequent governments couldn’t take the proposal forward due to central trade union opposition.
‘Investors hampered’
•“It is incontestable that the law on prior permission has a chilling effect on new investors, particularly in a situation in which there are many other unfavourable factors inhibiting investment,” said a working paper titled Labour Regulations and Growth of Manufacturing and Employment in India: Balancing Protection and Flexibility, released by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations in May 2015.
•“New investors are daunted by the requirement of permission as they fear that they would be burdened by the need to continue employing the work force even after it has become unprofitable for them to run the business.”
•The trade unions will continue to oppose the move to give more flexibility to industries to retrench or shut shop.
•“The Rajasthan government increased the threshold limit under the I-D Act in 2014 but there has been no change in the business development scenario in the State in last three years as per our assessment,” said RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) general secretary Virjesh Upadhyay. “If someone can convince us that this proposal will help business prosper, we will fully support it. But as we know, it will only harass the workers.”
Shining bright
The clearance from the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs for a plan to double the capacity of solar power installed in dedicated solar parks to 40 gigawatts by 2020, with partial government fiscal assistance, is in line with the goal of creating a base of 100 gigawatts by 2022. Expansion of solar power capacity is among the more efficient means to meet the commitment to keep carbon emissions in check under the Paris Agreement on climate change, and it can provide the multiplier effect of creating additional employment, with overall economic dividends. As the International Renewable Energy Agency notes in its report titled REthinking Energy 2017: Accelerating the global energy transformation, globally, jobs in solar energy have witnessed the fastest growth since 2011 among various renewable energy sectors. Asia has harnessed the potential the most, providing 60% of all renewable energy employment, while China enjoys the bulk of this with a thriving solar photovoltaic and thermal manufacturing industry, besides installations. Apart from measures to scale up generating capacity, India should take a close look at competitive manufacturing of the full chain of photovoltaics and open training facilities to produce the human resources the industry will need in the years ahead. Renewables and new energy storage technologies are on course to overshadow traditional fossil fuel-based sources of power as the costs decline.
Low-cost financing channels hold the key to quick augmentation of solar generating capacity. The trend in some emerging economies, including India, has been a reduction in public financing of renewable energy projects over the last five years. This has implications for equity in the long run, and electricity regulators should fix tariffs taking into account the reduction in the levelised cost of electricity (the average break-even price over a project’s lifetime). Yet, recourse to other funding options, including regulated debt instruments such as green bonds, would be necessary to achieve early, ambitious targets. Without realistic purchase prices, utilities could resort to curtailment of renewable power sources on non-technical considerations, affecting investments. Tamil Nadu, a solar leader in the country, resorted to curtailments last year, a phenomenon that has perhaps muted industry interest in its recent 500 MW tender. The funding mix for renewables, therefore, should give climate financing an important role. At the Paris UN Climate Change Conference, developed countries pledged to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 for mitigation, and more in later years, a promise that needs to be vigorously pursued. Besides promoting phase two of the solar parks plan, and powering public facilities such as railway stations and stadia using solar power, the Centre should put in place arrangements that make it easier for every citizen and small business to adopt rooftop solar. This is crucial to achieving the overall goal of 100 GW from this plentiful source of energy by 2022, and to raise the share of renewables in the total energy mix to 40 per cent in the next decade.
Wind tariffs at a low of Rs. 3.46 per unit
•Wind power tariffs closed at ₹3.46 per kWh in India's first-ever auction for wind energy projects as the country aims to tap renewable energy to overcome its power shortages.
•The bid was called by government-owned Solar Energy Corporation of India for 1 GW of wind capacity.
Mytrah Energy
•Mytrah Energy, Green Infra, Inox and Ostro Energy each won the rights to set up 250 MW of wind capacity in a location of their choice and to sell the energy generated to state-run Power Trading Corporation. Sources say that the two states under consideration for these projects are Tamil Nadu and Gujarat.
•Such low tariffs in wind energy come on the back of historically low solar tariffs achieved in a recent auction of a total capacity of 750 MW.
•The reverse auction completed in Rewa in Madhya Pradesh saw solar tariffs fall to ₹2.97 per unit and ₹3.3 per unit when levelised over the 25-year power purchase agreement period.
•“The level of participation in the recent solar and wind auctions points to the coming of age of the industry,” Vikram Kailas, MD & CEO of Mytrah Energy, one of the bid winners, said.
‘Hard-fought auction’
•“The auctions have been hard fought and have led to tighter pricing than one would have foreseen even a few months earlier. This speaks to the growing confidence of the players in their ability to deliver projects on terms that are globally competitive. Ultimately, this will pave the way for the secular growth of the Indian renewable energy sector.”
•“After solar cost reduction below ₹3 per unit, wind power cost down to ₹3.46 per unit through transparent auction. A green future awaits India,” Minister of New and Renewable Energy Piyush Goyal tweeted following the auction, which started on Thursday and was completed on Friday.
•However low tariffs could prove to be a problem for developers since the focus will now have to shift to ensuring low costs. “Prima facie, the viability would depend on the plant load factors, capital costs, and getting long-term debt at competitive rates,” Girish Kadam, vice president at ICRA said.
•“The choice of location is with the bidder so that they can choose to locate the project where there is enough wind resource.”
•“Wind is a gift to mankind by environment & the historic low cost of ₹3.46 per unit wind power shows our commitment to leverage clean energy,” Mr. Goyal said in a subsequent tweet.
