At Abu Road to celebrate 80 years of the founding of the BRAHMA KUMARI spiritual movement, REENA SINGH visits their spanking new solar thermal plant, a pioneering, revolutionary technology on renewable energy, the first in India
BK Golo Pilz,a regular at international climate change conferences,often made spirited presentations on the India One Solar Thermal Power Project that had been underway at Abu Road in Rajasthan since many years. And now, finally, the solar plant commissioned in March 2017, marks the beginning of a new thrust in India’s quest for renewable sources of energy. Golo Pilz, the plant’s project head first explains the workings of the solar thermal plant, and then devotes an equal amount of time in convincing his audience that ‘we are all part of one world’ and that the responsibility of making it a ‘better place’ lies with us. The renewable energy showcase project is researched and designed by the World Renewal Spiritual Trust,a sister organisation of the Brahma Kumaris. With ‘Om Shanti’ as motto, all team members from across the world and India, working on the project, are offered meditation classes as a matter of course. I was there just two weeks after the 1 MW project’s commission, to participate in the Brahma Kumaris’ 80- year celebrations. Students, professors and experts from the government were also hard at work at a three-day workshop at that time. “The plant is an engineering marvel,” is how IIT Bombay professor Shireesh B Kedare, who was there to attend the workshop, described the project.
Save The Earth
The decade-long research and development done by a green team of dedicated BK brothers and sisters, most of them hardcore engineers, has paid off.They are proving to the world that if India can take to solar thermal plants, it can take the lead in preventing global warming, save precious fossil fuels, and help prevent unnatural climate change. The Brahma Kumaris, better known for their deep, intense Raja Yoga meditation, have been working for several years in the field of renewable energy. Back in 1996, they set up small, parabolic mirror Scheffler dishes, focusing their heat into heavy cast iron blocks that had metal coils filled with water passing over it. The steam so produced was harnessed to generate power to cook food. By 1999,they had set up a much larger system at their Shantivan complex in Abu Road and were cooking up to 35,000 meals daily with this revolutionary German technology that had been adapted to suit Indian conditions. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who inaugurated the 80th anniversary celebrations of the BKs — appropriately titled, ‘God’s Wisdom for World Transformation’— through video conferencing, spoke of harnessing solar energy in the country and urged the Brahma Kumaris to lead the initiative.
The PM said, “Under the leadership of the Brahma Kumaris, we can bring about an energy revolution and a revolution in human lives.”He was acknowledging the new solar thermal plant and the solar cooking applications being used there since 1997.“India has set the target of producing 175 gigawatts of energy from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030,” PM Modi added. How does the team combine a spiritual lifestyle with an advanced scientific project? Says BK Jayasimha, CEO, India One Solar Thermal Power Plant,“We have been working with solar energy since the last 22 years. As a spiritual organisation, our objective is to always develop something that is indigenous. Our aim was to develop something connected to the people here and to involve them.”The plant was built by the local people. ‘Make the project a part of their own story, their own project and let the local community identify itself with clean technology, then it gets accepted,’ is how the BKs see it. Adds Jayasimha,“We have trained many people including engineers, free of cost, since the last 20 years.We developed our first solar cooker in 1997 at Gyan Sarovar, Mt Abu, and in 1999, the biggest solar cooker was put up at our Abu Road headquarters in Rajasthan. Then,we helped set up at least 500 solar cookers all over India in large organisations.We supported them technically. The unique thing about this plant is that because we use steam,we are able to store energy for the night.” Conventional solar plants still use coal, and batteries for storage for power requirements at night. Vinayak Bhai,another ‘surrendered’ BK — the word they use to describe the almost 10,000 brothers and sisters who are renunciates and have given up family life and material pleasures to serve the community — gives us some technical specifications of the project: “The plant has 765 parabolic reflectors called Scheffler dishes, each with a mirror surface area of 60 sq mt and is built on 55 acres of land.”
Reuse Is The Key
The term ‘reuse’,synonymous with such projects is naturally a keyword here.Vinayak Bhai tells us that the area between the reflectors too will be used to grow vegetables.Moreover,the plant is completely pollution-free and truly harnesses nature’s power. “Even the packing pine wood of the mirrors that came from Germany has been used to make furniture and other structures,” he points out. The project cost was around Rs 80 crore — with contributions from the German and Indian governments and from the BKs. Projects like these give hope that India, with its abundance of sunshine, can easily lead from the front, supplying clean energy for all of the country’s needs.The goals of the BKs are in synergy with the government’s goal of energy generation from alternative sources. BK Aneta Loj, from Poland, is their manager, research and development at the solar plant. She said: “PM Modi mentioned so much about solar energy and said that we must do more and that we must support the government’s initiatives.” It isn’t always that a spiritual organisation leads in a cutting-edge field such as solar power generation.The BKs are also the largest institutional user of solar energy in the country. They realise that the world is in trouble, with the population of planet earth using up the resources of not one, but 1.6 earths.The BKs warn that trends towards materialism and overconsumption, will lead to a crisis, reminding us of M K Gandhi’s words, spoken 80 years ago: ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed’.
■ Follow the Brahma Kumaris at speakingtree.in