Renewable Energy means
1. Electricity produced from solar
2. Electricity produced from thermal plants
3. Electricity produced from coal
4. Electricity produced from wind
Choose the correct answer from

Question

Renewable Energy means
1. Electricity produced from solar
2. Electricity produced from thermal plants
3. Electricity produced from coal
4. Electricity produced from wind
Choose the correct answer from the options given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, 1 and 4 only. A renewable source is one that is replenished on a human timescale, so that using it today does not reduce what is available tomorrow. Take the four statements in turn. Statement 1, solar, qualifies without argument: the flux arriving from the Sun is not depleted by being intercepted, and India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has solar at the centre of its portfolio. Statement 4, wind, qualifies for the same reason — wind is driven by differential solar heating of the atmosphere and the Earth's rotation, and a turbine takes energy from a flow that is continually regenerated. Statement 3, coal, is the textbook example of the opposite. It is a fossil fuel formed from plant matter buried and compressed over tens of millions of years; the stock is finite, it is not being replaced at any rate relevant to human use, and burning it is the single largest source of carbon dioxide emissions. Any option containing 3 is therefore wrong, and that removes (a), (b) and (c) at a stroke — which is the fastest route through this question. Statement 2, 'electricity produced from thermal plants', is the one that needs Indian usage rather than physics. In Indian power statistics 'thermal' means a station that raises steam by burning a fuel — coal, lignite, natural gas or diesel — and thermal capacity is reported as the fossil half of the installed base, against hydro, nuclear and renewables. It is true that a solar-thermal or biomass station also works by heat, and that geothermal energy is thermal and renewable; but the term as the examiner uses it, and as the Ministry of Power uses it, denotes fossil generation. So statement 2 is out, and only 1 and 4 stand.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Includes both of the fossil statements and, worse, drops wind — the one source besides solar that is unambiguously renewable and that carries India's second largest renewable capacity. An option that admits coal to a list of renewable sources cannot survive any definition of the term.  (b) Pairs solar with coal, which is the sharpest possible contradiction of the definition — an inexhaustible flux beside a finite stock laid down over tens of millions of years. It also omits wind altogether. Choosing it usually means the candidate read only as far as the first statement.  (c) The most dangerous option on the page, because it gets solar and wind exactly right and then adds coal. A candidate who is confident about statements 1 and 4 and does not read statement 3 carefully will take it. On a paper with a penalty of one-third of a mark, the discipline of checking every listed item before choosing a combination is what this question is testing.

Concept: Energy sources are classified two ways, and BPSC uses both. The first split is renewable against non-renewable: renewable sources — solar, wind, hydro, biomass, geothermal, tidal and wave — are replenished continuously, while non-renewable sources — coal, lignite, petroleum, natural gas and nuclear fuel — exist as finite stocks. Note that nuclear is non-renewable but is not a fossil fuel, and is low-carbon, which is why policy documents often use the wider category 'non-fossil' rather than 'renewable'. The second split is conventional against non-conventional, which is about how long a source has been in commercial use rather than about whether it runs out; coal, oil, gas, nuclear and large hydro are conventional, while solar, wind, small hydro, biomass and waste-to-energy are grouped as non-conventional and are the charge of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. India's climate commitments are framed in the non-fossil vocabulary: at the Glasgow climate conference in November 2021 India announced the five-point Panchamrit, including 500 gigawatts of non-fossil electricity capacity by 2030, meeting half its energy requirements from renewable energy by 2030, and net zero emissions by 2070.

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