Get excited Spain and Poland, India is hoping to become one of the world’s top twenty emitters of carbon emissions with its Of course, on a local level, India can only afford to worry so much about global climate change and must worry about finding a way to bring power to the literally hundreds of millions of citizens who are living without electricity. Though local residents of the Andhra Pradesh area as well as environmental NGOs have warned of the environmental and water pollution damage from the ports that will handle the coal, the project seems set to go.
The situation is reminiscent of the China of the 1990s, which fueled its population via its vast coal reserves. One might note that today China is certainly paying an environmental price for that decision. Just last year, India approved plans for a hundred and seventy three coal power stations that will provide an estimated eighty to one hundred gigawatts (GW) of electrical capacity within just a few years. As an added bonus to add travel carbon footprint miles, the power stations are anticipated to be fueled with cheaply imported coal from Australia, Indonesia and southern Africa. However, about 600m tonnes of coal in India may be mined as well, pending the approval of mining applications.
Andhra Pradesh, with a population of just over eighty-five million people, is expanding its power production by eight hundred percent. The first plant scheduled to be opened, the four billion dollar Krishnapatnam power station, will have a 4GW capacity and will be one of the world’s twenty-five biggest electrical sources. It will have the ability to power seven million middle-class homes. Using coal. Think of all of those homes powered by … coal.
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