You’ve paid infrastructure and education cesses. Now, get ready to shell out a green cess of 5 paise per kWh electricity. If the Karnataka government has its way, for the first time, the state will levy this on industrial and commercial establishments to raise funds for renewable energy.
Also, if have a solar rooftop power generating set-up of 5-10 kW, you can sell that power to the grid. These are some of the highlights of the state’s first renewable energy policy.
For the full text, click on: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/Bangalore/Green-cess-to-raise-Rs-55-crore/articleshow/4637249.cms
While all these can be seen as positive steps, the crux of the problem relating to the sector, namely cash-flow, which comes out of the subsidy regime and the inefficiencies covered in its name, has not been addressed. It's not that the government does not know how to go about it - check here , but, apparently the political will is still lacking.
Muralidhar Rao
Forward this Blog entry
Comments
Pioneering effort indeed
The industry still has not discovered how to make money with the green wave but the govt has figured out already!!!
Instead of putting a carbon credit system in place govt has figured out a way to pay salaries and expand employment in vidhan soudha.
§§§ Tweetenator
From the linked article:
From the linked article: "We proposed a green cess of 5 paise per kilowatt hour (kWh) on commercial and industrial consumers and that's expected to generate about Rs 55 crore annually for renewable energy," said G Satish, conservator of forests and general manager, KREDL.
Hilarious! It should read "of renewable revenue from non renewable energy".
Innefficiences in govt will never allow us to get any value for the money that goes in. All it needs to do is set a carbon credit system in place and allow trading of credits transparently on an exchange there is no need for the govt to be playing the middle man exchanging money here. We all know how many sites the middleman ends up buying for his progeny.
§§§ Tweetenator
Tax residential consumers as well
Well even residential consumers leave behind a carbon foot print. Why leave them out?
While Time of Day Metering (ToD) is there for industries, it should be there for residential users as well. Time of Day Metering is an arrangement where electricity tarrif is high or low during peak and non-peak hours respectively.
Solar Photo Voltaic is not really effecient and for all practical purposes has a capacity factor of just around 15%. This is against 20% for wind, which on a per kWh basis is much lesser.
Therefore, the Green Residential Power policy should focus on rooftop Vertical Axis Wind Turbines instead of Solar PV as proposed by this draft policy.
Well, its a start..