International Solar Alliance: The Saffron Supergrid Superpower

The clash of civilisations has veritably defined world history since the ancient to the modern times. Ownership, control, domination and exploitation of resources across economic value chains has been at the heart of that clash. The driving force behind technological advancements, scientific discoveries and inventions has singularly remained the urge to achieve world-domination by colonial nation-states and corporations. The quest for energy has undeniably been the foremost example of such conflicts. Oil, nuclear power and hydropower have been embedded at the intersection of that quest and those global conflicts, in the post Second World War geopolitical regime. Renewable sources of energy have become the newest weapon in the arsenal of global energy domination.

Furthermore, developed nations have invested heavily in renewable energy technology making the developing countries, particularly India, dependent on the developed countries. India and USA have fought at least one international case on the issue of domestic content in the solar projects in India. Simultaneously, with the North-South divide, there is a South-South divide as well. China has followed a strategy of mass production at mammoth scales with the help of cheap labour, thus outpricing the developed countries on the cost of solar photovoltaic systems. This has raised eyebrows and prompted protectionist measures by other nations. In countries like India, it has led to the hemming in of the local solar PV market as the developers split between developed countries solar PV technology for high quality on the one side and China for cheap PVs on the other.

The debate on climate change has also split the developed countries from within as evidenced in the exit of USA from the Paris Accord under Republican President Donald Trump. This move didn’t last long and was undone by the Democrat President Joe Biden in January 2021 on securing victory.

But, things are about to change. A new organisation called the International Solar Alliance (ISA), without much ado, endeavors to upend that global dynamic of conflict and alter the equation towards global energy cooperation and unification. ISA has an idea that would be a pioneering affirmation to the evolution of the human race itself, no less. They call it ‘One Sun, One World, One Grid.’

The idea of ISA has been widely and undisputedly acknowledged as being the brainchild of  Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  Not just the ISA itself but one of ISA’s most ambitious ideas of OSOWOG is also Narendra Modi’s hypothesis. It cannot be that the prospective success of ISA doesn’t rub off on the persona of Narendra Modi himself as a global statesman. It’d be worth pondering what that impact might be and how sizable it might be in the foreseeable future. A good orientating peak would be to evaluate this puzzle from the perspective of equal exemplars that might exist in human history of statesmen and world leaders and global experiences of their own vehicles equivalent of ISA that they might have created or inspired in one form or the other, say the institution of the Nobel Prize itself that was established by Alfred Nobel to award scientists for scientific breakthroughs. However, one cannot bring to mind a single statesman who might have birthed an idea in spite of being unlettered in the scientific body of knowledge of the area to which the idea belonged.

India armed with ISA under its belt is situated advantageously to play a leadership role in the negotiations on climate change by using ISA as a pivot to take the developing, LDC and SIDS countries under its fold and strengthening its bargaining power at the high table

Talking to a group of people at his PM’s residence at 10, Lok Kalyan Marg, New Delhi on June 8, 2014, PM Narendra Modi had first spoken about the “Saffron Revolution”. Quick to quip that he was aware that the mere mention of the word “Saffron” raises eyebrows, he further revealed that the color “saffron” represents the energy of the Sun. He contextually mentioned that energy security needs to be strengthened. He observed that the issues of global warming and increased energy requirements were on a collision path. He stated that we need to find answers to the quest of sustainable energy fulfillment. He said that India is blessed with abundance of solar energy potential as evidenced in the solar radiation footprint. He asked why India had failed to take advantage of the latent solar energy potential? He asserted that India would have to make swift and long strides in renewable energy proliferation. He gave the example of the United States and how it was historically dependent on the Gulf region for its energy needs but had recently made significant progress in becoming self-sufficient in the area.

India armed with ISA under its belt is situated advantageously to play a leadership role in the negotiations on climate change by using ISA as a pivot to take the developing, LDC and SIDS countries under its fold and strengthening its bargaining power at the high table.

Out of 100 quintillion (10^20) stars and 1 septillion (10^24) planets in the observable universe, astrophysicists have managed to locate just one pair of a star and a planet that revolves around the former such that the former sustains the most intelligent thriving life known to mankind on the latter. The star is the saffron Sun and the planet is Earth. Needless to say, the intelligent life is humankind itself.

One Sun. One World

Hitting the Earth with about 600 Exajoules of energy in less than two hours, the Sun offers energy equivalent to the entire energy consumption by the whole world from all sources in an entire year. However, humans produce and consume just 2 Exajoules of solar energy in a whole year. This number has grown at a rate of 50 per cent each year over the last 13 years. If we relax technological and logistical constraints and continue growing at this rate, the human race would take 37 years to be able to match the rate at which the Sun supplies energy to Earth with solar energy production on Earth. No wonder, Elon Musk recently said that the Sun can power all of civilisation. It’s possible.

Now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s idea is quietly taking us from the outer realms of the possible to the central zone of the probable. The future of tapping into the free fusion reactor levitating in the wilderness of the vast cosmos, at a scale unimaginable till now, is closer and brighter than ever before. The transformative leadership of that Solar Superman started a few years ago with the declared vision of initiating a global “Saffron revolution”. The vision has led to the formation of an organisation seeking to unify the world with the ubiquitous energy of the Sun, that paints the sky saffron as it rises and sets.

PM Modi is the unlikeliest of characters to be placed anywhere in a script of such potentially path breaking proportions as the ISA, let alone him being the scriptwriter himself. He is not an inventor like Elon Musk or a scientist or even an energy magnate like Howard Hughes.

Headquartered in India, the International Solar Alliance (ISA) seeks to do what no organisation has done or thought before. It endeavors to unify the world in one mega, smart Solar SuperGrid and build a global, unified solar energy economy through an aggregated network of all nations in the world through a Whole-of-World (WoW) approach. ISA’s ambition is to herald the world’s biggest and first unified cooperative solar energy market in the entire existence of the human race, ever.

One Sun. One World. One Grid. Or, OSOWOG

I call it the “SuperGrid '' and it’s the most powerful global unification idea after the internet itself. ISA is not just a paradigm shift. It’s a quantum leap, simply as an idea in its theoretical construct. If applied with purpose and might, it can prove to be a wormhole to travel at warp speed into an evolutionary higher plane of human existence. The parallel world that it seeks to plunge 7 trillion people into, promises the best of all the worlds with which we are familiar. Energy security. World peace. Technological revolutions, possibly born of serendipity (who knows what the SuperGrid might lead to, as goes the law of unintended consequences). The mere grasp of the possibilities can cause geostrategic tectonic shifts in the way the idea of ‘nationhood’ itself is perceived.

Imagine energy produced in the Thar desert in India during the day transmitted to power the homes in uptown Manhattan, in real time, where the Sun would have yet not arisen. Unthinkable as it is right now, this unprecedented achievement would itself pale into insignificance when juxtaposed to the distant but real possibilities of weaving the world into a fabric that thus far might have been knitted by scientists and geostrategic experts. Even so – such theoretical constructs have been presented only sparsely by electrical engineers in technical scientific papers or by geostrategic thinkers in their think tanks as games of interdependence, co-existence and cooperation. Let it be known that the world has been more familiar with wars of domination and conflict when it comes to the sharing of resources, energy most of all.

In this context, the ISA presents an idea that’s refreshing and provides an opportunity to reset and reboot the modern civilizational tussle over resources and remodel and re-channel it into a truly renewable relationship.

ISA is unique for many reasons. It’s the first Inter-governmental organisation that is headquartered in India. There is no parallel of a similar UN-treaty based IGO headquartered anywhere in the world where the purpose is the propagation and adoption of a technology and, as a logical corollary, of a market, in this case solar energy. Furthermore, and more importantly, the central idea, as also witnessed by the stated intent of the organisation is not the aggrandizement and control of the technology but the universal promotion of it, such that it becomes ever more affordable and simpler to deploy and use. This is very unlike, say OPEC, which is a cabal that controls the supply and thereby the price of oil. It is also very unlike OBOR that’s promoted by China, which surpasses the intent of mere market access, supply and price control and charts a fresh territory of predatory ‘debt-diplomacy’ based international relations. What’s more, it is a purely voluntary organisation with no obligations or strings attached for any of the member countries.

France and India are the co-founders of ISA with the permanent secretariat established in India. India’s role as a leader in all aspects till now has been a foregone conclusion. France has taken deep interest in partnering with India in key initiatives of the ISA. The footprint of ISA has expanded to 101 countries and counting. Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and USA are the latest entrants.

Of course, while ISA has come into being as a manifestation of the thought of PM Modi, it has seen very deft commandeering in its infancy by its first Director General Upendra Tripathy, whose work has been critical in the past as Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, under whose tenure, India’s renewable energy sector grew exponentially and solar power tariffs witnessed democratisation and met ‘grid parity’ levels.

Launching the International Solar Alliance on November 30, 2015 in Paris at the COP 21 Climate Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of the importance of the Sun in ancient, pre-colonial, pre-Islamic, Hindu traditions and said:

“Since ancient times, different civilisations have given a special place to Sun. In the Indian tradition, Sun is the source of all forms of energy. As Rig Veda says, Sun God is the Soul of all beings, moving and non-moving. Many in India begin their day with a prayer to the Sun.”

He articulated the importance of the International Solar Alliance, by saying:

“Today, when the energy sources and excesses of our industrial age have put our planet in peril, the world must turn to the Sun to power our future. As the developing world lifts billions of people into prosperity, our hope for a sustainable planet rests on a bold global initiative. It will mean advanced countries leaving enough carbon space for developing countries to grow. That is natural climate justice. It also means a growth path with a lighter carbon footprint. So, convergence between economy, ecology and energy should define our future. The vast majority of humanity is blessed with generous sunlight round the year. Yet, many are also without any source of power. This is why this alliance is so important.”

Thus, the ISA was born. International Solar Alliance (ISA), an intergovernmental organisation (IGO) was co-founded by India and France about six years ago. ISA has witnessed a continuously rising gradient of significantly and incrementally increased attention not just amongst the community of scientists and scholar studying the subject of climate change or the independent power producers in the economic sector of renewable energy but also by international geo-strategists working both in national governments and in academia, as also by experts in international law. Few, if any at all, similar entities have entertained greater interest across continents, except perhaps China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR).