The Draft India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP), released recently by Union environment ministry, is grossly inadequate in its scope and ambition. Discuss (200 words)
Refer – Business Standard
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 6 years
KEY POINTS
· India is the first country in the world to develop such a document – ICAP.
· It provides a 20-year perspective (2017-18 to 2037-38) to address the cooling requirements across sectors and ways and means to provide access to sustainable cooling for all.
Concerns with ICAP
· While the ICAP aims to provide sustainable cooling and thermal comfort for all, its actual intent is myopically focused on only the market for personal air conditioners, ignoring the fact that demand for cooling is driven by people.
· Equity issue – About 60 per cent of current space cooling energy consumption is by top 10 per cent of the population and over 96 per cent of transport cooling energy consumption is due to personal cars.
· This small minority skews electricity demand and locks in enormous carbon energy guzzling.
· If we are planning to provide 'Sustainable Cooling' and 'Thermal Comfort for All', we cannot ignore 90 per cent of the Indian population's need to have thermal comfort and also the requirements of a range of other services including agricultural cold chains, provision of safe vaccines, and many other services that require cooling to function. These have remained outside the scope of the ICAP.
· Bench mark – The ICAP has not indicated the benchmark for thermal comfort that needs to guide energy efficiency measures for all – users of active as well as passive cooling.
· This lack of planning can completely upset the energy budget of the country.
Suggestions
· India needs to define thermal comfort to guide interventions for energy efficiency in buildings.
· There is also a need to estimate cooling demand based on thermal comfort definition and not on sales of ACs.
· National building codes should be amended to ensure all buildings are designed in a way that indoor conditions do not get hotter than the national goal for majority of hours in the year using passive design.
· There is also a need for more robust standards, labelling and testing methodology for ACs.
