Peripherally yours, Chennai

 

Centrifugal forces have been acting on me at large,  and over the decades, getting me to explore new facets of Madras – now Chennai – in its different facets.  We would  as kids travel from Delhi to Madras, spend a few days in Mylapore and quickly take the meter gauge train from Egmore to Thanjavur and descend further into quaintness. 

Yes, there was less traffic in Madras, and yes the pace was unhurried, but the poverty was stark, and the differences between haves and have-nots was a really deep chasm.  By early 1980s things began to change – we moved to Adyar while grandparents lived in Mylapore, a few airconditioned joints showed up in Mt. Road, a hole in the wall in Adyar had a name called Hungry Tiger doling what was called Pizza, and if we needed Chinese food, we could catch a 5B, or drive a herald or a vespa and eat at Waldorfs just before the IIT gate,.  A decade and more later, with Ford at Maraimalai nagar, and TCS at the TIDEL park in madras, the city actually had a consuming middle class – along with an array of restaurants – Eden, Wangs Kitchen, Dasa Dosa, Cascade and the like that kept those looking to unwind a place to do so, in airconditioned comfort and friendly service.  And with movie theatres and a mall (Spencers) and the sabhas in December for the cultural affirmation.  If people wanted an outing and a swig,  Mahabs was an hour away and two hours more there was Pondy.     And for an evening stroll on the beach there was Bessie,.  Madras or Chennai seemed to still retain that cosy feel, while growing in comforts.  Those who were in were in.  Lets leave it at that.

Perhaps our future has little in common with the black hole, with its mammoth inward pull..  As it often happen in these modern times, people find other places and pursuit to disperse into.   While life had taken me to US for a decade and more I have found a nest in the cooler Bengaluru, assignments and family still calls me to Chennai – but this time around it is as far away as Kalyan is from Churchgate.   To places like Maraimalai Nagar and more.  Even a city with a reputation for efficiency as Chennai will throw a traffic jam or two if the commute is 50 KM.  I found that the magic lies in multimodal transport – a fast airconditioned metro to Meenambakkam and an Uber from there.  Sometimes meetings would yank me around like a yo-yo from south Chennai to places like Padi.  So I get Uber to take me around.  My first question to the Uber driver is, is the AC good.  Some of them will say – sir – come to the front.  And  in the next 40 minutes I would strike a conversation or sometimes listen in to their world.  His daughter asking when is he going to come home – his wife asking him to buy sweets as guests are coming.  I would ask them where are they from – Bodi, Ramanthapuram, Chengam, Nellore.   The drivers are a polite lot, each having a different taste – the radio-stations whose film songs play to the lowest common denominator in any language were often ignored by the drivers – “yaaru sir, atheu paatu kaettindu, thalai than valikum – who can listen to these songs again and again – it is just a headache”.  Some of them play a downloaded movie on their cell phone – Jai Bhim – that’s discerning..  he turned down the volume and turned to me and said – sir – my target is 3000 rupees a day, 25 days a month.  If I do that I run my home, take my family to the movies, send my kid to an English medium school and send money to my village,  Another driver drove clients from Truichy and was trying to Uber his way back, at least till Mahindra world city to cover his fuel and toll.  He said Truichy is not an Uber city – he has his network of tourist hotels and thrives on temple tourism.   Most recently a Wagon R  had a large central console – the driver logged me in, touched the touch screen, scrolled to a You tube channel in Tamilnadu – the topic was polluting thermal power and nuclear plants and their safety.. what happened in Fukushima was lucidly explained.  So I asked the driver is he an engineer – yes – I drive Uber sometimes – and he talked about solar panels in every-rooftop with batteries to reduce load on thermal power and much more -  yes – we prosper here because there is peace and there are no divisions based on religion and there should not be any class / caste differences –no one higher and no one lower,  if that really happens it would be even better.   Mylapore is of course 50 KM away from these conversations.  The evening took us to the fabled Old Mahabalipruram Road – from GST road, and Vandalur, bisecting the gloriously wooded  zoo the  left and some land cornered by forest department – equally wooded to the right.  More patches of lakes and woods followed – giving way to VIT,  and then residential towers and IT parks and on to Old Mahabalipuram Road – Madhya Kailash (at Adyar) – 30 KMs it said – while IT complexes and swank apartments sprung out of land in or abutting water bodies – with restaurants and malls on the main road.  A new Chennai – hopefully a bit more peripheral to the hardened divisions of class and more, knitted together by Ubers in case one wants to mingle a bit more by design or circumstance, instead of our own cocoons of commute to office and home.

For the threads that bind...

 

On the threads that bind…

Happy xxxx is a greeting often seen in social media, and today’s feed was no different. A day spent to honest materials research under a hot shop floor with cutting edge materials and a data logging laptop was interrupted with a happy Onam. Yes happy Oman I messaged back. Happy namo came another response. Sure he is I thought and got back to work. The day done; a cool Uber took me to an air-conditioned metro which took me to Chennai central.  Happy Onam the lady greeted to someone over the phone. That done her phone with a Jesus Saves as the DP buzzed, her tone was more than a tad respectful. What did you eat? Was the Avial OK? He is on a call, right? I will take a metro and come home. Not to worry. Ah. Ah. Sure. Thanks. Tomorrow is Avani Avittam? Oh yeah. Are we going to make payasam? Sure. The person next to me was juggling cultures and schedules. Unfettered by healthy diet, I waved out when ice-cream vendor passed by, cutlets, avoided cold dosas with rivers of chutney and dozed off. My school group buzzed. There was an argument between free speech loving American desis and anti-preached desis. Happy Raksha  bandhan and happy Avani Avittam said another thread. While these are well intentioned events, with the former supporting some interaction between genders when it was all frowned upon, while the latter is a brahmin male’s ritual committing to learning and piety, marked by the changing of sacred thread, to mark  the  retrieval of Vedas stolen by demons back to Brahma – however this tradition excludes women and men who are not brahmins by birth.  Hence the debate, to put it mildly.

The best interpretation of the Raksha Bandhan is that women are vulnerable, and the men protect them tying what is a platonic knot symbolised in the form of a thread. Who are they protected from? The nameless underworld? A frustrated lumpen? Or those who belong to any other? And why not the other way round. The men who are vulnerable to myriad pressures, including being robbed, mugged, cyber duped? I That only the males offer protection is a stereotype.

Avani Avittam is the day when Brahmin males change their sacred thread. A morning spent in gentle male bonding within the clan, with shlokas narrated, Ganesha propitiated, an hour spent cross legged in front of a smoky fire, verses narrated without comprehending the meaning.  The girls don’t get to partake, they can of course cook dishes to mark the event.  People from other castes are not a part of this ritual.   A tradition that is kept alive partly out of belief, and partly because other good traditions are under assault.  Well, others are not equipped to understand is the refrain.  The shlokas, even the more profound ones are not too complicated. If high school kids can solve differential equations and perform matrix inversions and multiplications they certainly will not blank out when asked to narrate the meaning of Gayatri Mantra. While these rituals are replete with meaning and symbolism, connecting us to the divine, exclusion is the only problem.

So here is a simple appeal to make all threads universal.

Switching to the corporate world, threads have become a buzz word. Especially a digital thread. In such a magically connected world, the digitised design process would interface with CAD drawings and on to production and on to production records and on to service records. The digital thread becomes the nerve Centre of organisation learning and memory. To lend complete meaning one needs to have a digital twin that connects changes to a component in service to how it got there in the first place, the manufacturing parameters, supplier heat numbers, quality records,and operating conditions including life limiting locations. Getting those threads connected is more that appending files, but getting to really understand material response to service conditions. Such a philosophy can be applied  to anything that is manufactured and put to use.   From implants to airfoils to batteries. A thread built on rigor. But like all engineering proclivities this such an approach tends to  be reductionist in nature, trying to simplify the complex. The unknowns are not dug further. But mashed under a probabilistic response. The focus has shifted more towards the digital thread and digital twin.  In some ways the systems response is like solving a multiple choice tough exam.  The toughest of the problems is left unsolved, while those that find traction are solved.   The corrosion condition that pushed the material to pit and crack gets ignored; the failure of a seal upstream in allowing the hotter gas flow to reach critical locations is ignored too.  The digital twin supports decision making for typical conditions while transients and upset events which are life limiting often get ignored.  But like a college kid who could ace the exam without knowing everything, initiatives like the digital twin continue to allow the organization to live the 80 – 20 rule without comprehending that when the bad 20% catches up one could be caught napping.

Therefore we engineers, have not quite gotten ourselves to say happy digital thread day..: today is Avani Avittam. Time to reboot the computers and data.  Partly because engineers on the ground, except for  the super ambitious are grounded. They are quite aware of the physics that is missing, in not being able to predict that corrosion fatigue failure, that fatigue interaction, that flutter induced damage event. With so many unknowns, the ones who are honest say, well the digital twin is great when the entire physics is nailed, but we need money to nail the entire physics.  However, the lure of a digital twin, that combines probabilistic algorithms with an 80% understanding of physics, to predict machine performance and failures, caught the upper leadership and drove a culture where the physics need not be completely understood.   The digital thread falls short of the ideal and needs to be further tuned.

Which gets us back to other threads in the society that bind and divide; Can all other societal threads be tuned too. To produce a twang that sounds inclusive

 

 

A full court press to reduce emissions.

Dr. K. Anand

 

Today, April 22nd is earth day.  The CO2 emissions level stands at 420.87 ppm.  It was 395 ppm a decade ago in 2013.  We are registering an annual increase of 2.5 ppm per year.  The median CO2 ppm for the scary 1.5 deg rise is 520 ppm - we are just 4 decades away that milestone if not sooner.  Power generation is the biggest contributor to emissions, accounting for more than 50% of green-house gas emissions in India.

 

Climate change, along with the urban heat island effects have pushed energy consumption to record levels  For example peak power demand has gone up by 50% in Tamil Nadu in less than a decade, and well before summer.  Despite the growing footprint of Renewables (RE), about 75% of the energy on tap comes from fossil fuel in India.  Given that wind energy is seasonal and feasible only in pockets, and solar energy is subject to variability in weather (smog, clouds, dust), this should come as no surprise.   With the country recovering from COVID the last two years have seen some of the highest offtake of coal in recent times.  Coal – freight trains now clog the tracks dispatching fuel to thermal power plants cranking at full capacity.   Given that the energy demand continues to be met through increased use of fossil fuels one needs to be honest in facing these facts and ask where the solution for the energy sector is, develop technologies and invest accordingly.

 

 

Fossil fuel-based power comprises of more than 75% of the delivered energy

Electricity sector in India - Wikipedia

An interesting question is can nature-based approaches such as afforestation and rapid increase in green cover provide a solution.  It would be interesting to take data from one state to explore this further.  Tamil nadu consumed forty-one crore units of power in one day on April 20^th according to The Hindu.  With 75% of the power coming from thermal power, this translates into thirty crore units of power from thermal power or close to fifty crore  Kg of coal burnt per day, resulting in 125 crore Kg or 1.25 million tons of CO2 in a day.  To sequester this back through forest-based solutions is a
daunting task.  .  Tamil Nadu’s standing forests of about 26000 sq km (20% of area) – six million acres would redress sixty million tons of CO2 or 60 days of emissions.  To sequester a year’s worth of emissions about 120000 sq.km of land area – or over 90% of the state needs to have green cover, which is impossible.   However, there are opportunities to mitigate this further, by converting lower carbon per hectare monoculture plantations to six hundred Tons / Hectare rain forests and sholas where possible, by regenerating mangroves across the coast, by converting barren coastal regions to dry evergreen forests such as those seen in Guindy and Point Calimere.  However one needs to be honest in acknowledging that these are mitigative steps and not the sole pathway to reach Nett Zero emissions.

 

A six hundred Tons / Hectare Shola Forest in Nilgiris

 

 

.   Clearly nature-based approaches are only part of the puzzle. One needs to redress emissions footprint for the different power generation modalities,  at source.  Potential solutions for include:

Technologies to Reduce Emissions from Power Generation by 5 to 30%:

 

·         More efficient thermal power. ultra super critical thermal for coal, coal gasification. And combined cycle gas turbines powered by syn-gas for reduced emissions even at higher cost.  This would reduce emissions from existing thermal power plants by about 20%

 

·         Combined cycle gas turbines at 64% efficiency as against 36% to 42% for new coal-based power plants.  This can reduce emissions by 30%

 

·         Carbon capture at an industrial scale.  While this would increase energy demand by 5 to 10%, all of CO2 in principle can be captured  - and could be part of a nett zero emissions play,

 

·         Thermal power augmented with biofuel – includes agro-residues, municipal waste.  Agro-waste is a renewable resource, and it contributes to reduced emissions to about 10 to 15% maximum.

 

 

Technologies for Zero Emissions

 

·         More renewables , offshore wind to address peak power demand in the evening. (5 to 10% of local energy demand)..  Of shore wind can generate up to three times  the energy per acre compared to on-shore installations

 

·         More Solar and wind energy,  rooftop solar and wind,  Irrigation pumps powered by solar contributing to zero emissions.

 

·         Nuclear.- despite risks this is a mature technology capable of delivering 24 x 7 power.  Counties such as France had shown clear thinking by resorting nuclear energy to meet 68% of its energy requirements through nuclear power.  Small nuclear power plants are an alternative that reduce risks of catastrophic exposure of population to radiation leaks should there be an accident.

 

·         Small Hydro  – these runs of the river installations amounting to less than a MW of power can harness energy from flowing streams. 

 

·         Agro-waste driven distributed power can unlock more revenue streams for farmers.  Crop waste, excreta from cattle could be used to generate either liquid fuel, methane, natural gas, or hydrogen to generate power, making farmers nett suppliers of energy.  Since any form of agro-waste or residue is a renewable resource these sources of energy are nett zero in emissions,

 

·         Green Hydrogen and ammonia – derived from renewable sources.

 

We have a plethora of technologies to reduce emissions.  Among these the only ones that are deployed at a mass scale accounting to a significant proportion of the energy mix are solar and wind energy.  The country requires a full court press – including technologies to reduce emissions from fossil fuel-based power, all renewable or Nett zero emissions energy sources, and nature-based solutions to sequester back greenhouse gases.

 

The country can clearly do more than what is being done now.  These tangible steps to maintain energy security while reducing emissions footprint could be the driver for future economic growth,

 

 

References

 

1              Electricity sector in India - Wikipedia

 

2.            Natural Resources Research (

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 2019) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11053-019-095
TV Ramchandra et. Al. “Carbon Sequestration Potential of the Forest Ecosystems in the Western Ghats, a Global Biodiversity Hotspot”