PINE NEEDLES Generating Power in Himalayas

By- Col Satish Singh Lalotra

“The Words Of God Are Not Like The Oak Leaves, Which Dies And Falls To The Earth, But Like The Pine Tree, Which Stays Green For Evermohawk Wisdom. 

The quintessential abode of Gods “The Himalayas” have  a  unique  quality of themselves, which we humans have stumbled from times immemorial and are still unravelling to no end. From folklores to religious treatises to medicine,  Himalayas have been omnipresent in the  life  of  an  Indian in all their splendour and glory.

Pine needle, which is actually the leaf of the pine tree called so due to its slender and sharp shape, is one such natural resource which is now providing everything to the hill people literally from tea to electricity. While other products from pine  needles are in  small  scale and of limited use, generating non- conventional power from these leaves in the hilly terrain has become a boon for pine rich states like Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh at present.
The Himalayan pine forests are a large subtropical coniferous  forest ecoregion.

This huge pine forest stretches across the lower elevations of the great Himalaya range for almost its entire length including parts of Pakistan’s Punjab Province in the west through Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and  Sikkim,  Nepal and Bhutan, which is the eastern extent of the pine forest. But these huge natural resources instead of coming to any  use by the humans used to cause forest fires, prevent rainwater from seeping into the ground and stop growth of grass, the main fodder of domestic cattle and grass eating wild animals.

Chir or Pine forests dominate the landscape (covering 400000/1540 square miles) of Uttarakhand.    One study  estimates  that the net annual pine needle yield in the state of Uttarakhand to be some 1.3 million tons. Pine needles shed by the trees between March to June cover the hill slopes which are prone to fire. Though forest fire plays an important ecological role, they also bring some incalculable losses. Here enters the saviour couple in all their sincerity, the duo of Rashmi Jain and her husband Rajnish Jain. Rashmi Jain, a graphic designer by profession with her husband a management consultant with a background in solar power irrigation, set up “Avani” company at Berinag in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand  in 1999.

They realized that electricity produced from these pine needles could supplement or replace cooking fuel. With this in mind they began to research using pine needles as a source of fuel /energy production called as “Bio mass Gasification”. In fact, “Biomass Gasification as a concept was not new in India at that time. But  according  to Rajnish  his  suggestion to use pine needles for Biomass  Gasification was met with resistance and rejection from government officials and researchers in  2007. In fact, the villagers were also alien to the concept of Gasification and thought of it as a farfetched idea. But one “Volkart foundation” , a venture set up by Swiss brothers in 1953 to support NGOs working for poor communities, had already invested in a pine needle experiment. With active support from agencies like these Rajnish struck on the idea of chopping these pine needles into smaller pieces to increase their density before feeding them into the Gasifier. Lo behold and it worked.

In 2009 he succeeded in setting up the world’s first 9 KWh pine needle power plant. Today this power plant produces power to generate the “Avani “workshop, while leftover carbon powder is bound together with locally made glue and made into briquettes to burn as a sustainable form of cooking fuel. Encouraged by his success, Rajnish participated in many accelerator programmes to pitch in his work and pursued support from various government agencies. It led to setting up the “Avani” bio energy a for-profit enterprise in 2011. “Avani bio energy then signed an agreement with the state electric facility, which under national policy was required to source a percentage of its energy from renewable sources.

By 2014, a policy on the commercial use of pine needles including Gasification was brought into effect by the Uttarakhand renewable energy development agency. But then there were many hurdles to this ambitious project still in store. The mountainous terrain in the region makes it difficult to collect pine needles scattered on the slopes.  They  hit  upon an idea of installing smaller decentralized power plants of 10-25 KWh each, so the volume of pine needles needed could be met with manual collection.

Rajnish threw up the idea of collection of these pine needles to the village women folk. Avani in fact has numerous examples where in the local women folk have earned additional about Rs 17,000/- per annum.There are now about seven x 25 KWh power plants at different villages on this Almora- Berinag stretch, with many of them owned by the village-based entrepreneurs. As  well  as  boosting the local economy, Rajnish hopes to lower the forest fires by his venture. The indigenous medicinal    plants usually destroyed by these forest fires have also been revived since then. Collection of pine needles from the ground on a mass scale also allowed rain water to seep in  and  natural grass to grow.

Recently, another pine needle rich state Himachal Pradesh has signed a memorandum of understanding with Oil India Ltd. (OIL) to start a pilot project for the bioconversion of pine needles into biofuel. The  utilisation  of pine needles for biofuel production through   pyrolysis and other techniques will be a sustainable way to deal with the forest fires as well as the  energy  crisis.  It is hoped that other pine rich Himalayan states will follow suit to prevent forest fire and meet acute power shortage.