In the industrial town of Morbi, Gujarat, the air usually hums with the rumble of gas kilns producing millions of square meters of ceramic tiles. Today, however, almost a quarter of the city’s ceramic units have fallen silent. Almost a thousand kilometers away in Ludhiana, Punjab, one of India’s largest hosiery and knitwear clusters, they face a similar silence. The reason is geopolitical.
As the conflict between the US and Iran escalates, the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil and gas artery, has turned into a gauntlet. India imports almost half of its natural gas and felt the pinch immediately – made more painful when the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas cut gas allocations to non-priority industrial sectors to just 65-80% of their contracted volumes.
For manufacturers in clusters like Morbi and Ludhiana, where firms have started exploring alternatives to gas and other fossil fuels, the current crisis must be a moment of validation as they move towards large-scale electrification of heat. But for others, it may look like an ultimatum to accelerated decarbonization, and for India in general a reminder that it needs thermal independence, i.e. a “sovereign” source of heat, rather than just energy independence.
Sunlight to heat
For decades, industrial heat has been synonymous with burning hydrocarbons such as coal or gas. For example, in Ludhiana’s textile mills, large boilers burn gas to generate steam used in dyeing and finishing. In Morbi, gas flames fire the tiles at temperatures in excess of 1,000°C.
Rooftop solar PV panels have become common, but they are designed to produce electricity, not the raw, intense heat that industries require, so technologies such as concentrated solar thermal (CST) could be relevant here. While photovoltaics use semiconductors to convert renewable sunlight into a stream of electrons, CST uses precisely controlled mirrors to concentrate sunlight into a receiver, where it heats a fluid such as water or molten salt to up to 400°C.
Most textile processes, including washing and bleaching, require temperatures between 100°C and 180°C. In principle, mills could install parabolic troughs on or near the factory grounds to generate pressurized steam directly from sunlight. According to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, India has a CST potential 6.4 GW. However, adoption remains low – but with gas prices already tripling as a result of the war in West Asia, the payback period for installing CST could also be shortened from the current seven years.
Efficient heat transfer
For more than a century, in a highly inefficient process, people in homes, engineers in laboratories, and industrial operators burned fuel to create hot air and then transferred that heat to a product. A gas boiler loses 20-30% of its energy in the flue gas. One proposed route to decarbonizing industrial heat replaces flame with electromagnetic heating methods such as induction or plasma. For example, an induction stove passes an electric current through a coil and creates a magnetic field that creates heat directly inside the metal or in the material being processed. There is no media such as air or steam to take away some of the heat, so the efficiency of such heaters is known to exceed 90%.
High temperature industries in India like ceramics and around the world are also exploring technologies like plasma torches for high temperature industrial processes. Here, the gas is ionized into a state called plasma – colloquially called the fourth state of matter – which can reach temperatures higher than those on the surface of the Sun. Plasma torches also allow users to precisely control their temperature, preventing under- or over-heating for various processes.
But the bigger question is whether India’s grid is ready. If large industrial clusters such as Ludhiana and Morbi were to rapidly switch to electric heating technologies, the additional load would pose a significant challenge to the power grid. This is because industrial heat currently accounts for around 25% of India’s total energy consumption, and shifting this load from gas pipelines to electric wires would pose a serious technical challenge.
The need for thermal policy
Most factories operate on a 24/7 cycle, while solar and wind power are intermittent, so to electrify heat for industry, India needs 24/7 renewable energy, which means large deployments of battery storage systems and pumped water reservoirs. Currently, India’s storage capacity is in its infancy and without it, the grid is unable to sustain the large “peaks” of power required by heavy industrial induction furnaces.
Second, local power grids in industrial clusters like Ludhiana are often aging. High-capacity induction heating requires high-voltage substations and reinforced cabling for last-mile delivery. Asset load reports from DISCOMs in industrial clusters suggest that roughly a quarter to a third of distribution transformers may be critically loaded during peak hours, with little room for additional demand such as electrified heat. Thus, the addition of industrial loads would require a significantly larger transformer capacity.
These limitations highlight the advantage of CST, especially as a source of heat that is not dependent on the grid. By generating thermal energy on site and storing it in insulated tanks, the factory can continue to operate at night without taking a single watt from the national grid. Thermal storage is also orders of magnitude cheaper than lithium-ion battery storage.
India needs a “National Thermal Policy” to survive the LPG crisis and complete the transition to electrified heat. Its current subsidies are heavily focused on electricity (especially photovoltaics), while there are few incentives for direct heating technologies such as CST. The government should consider providing the same accelerated depreciation and production-related incentives to CST mirror manufacturers as it has provided to solar cell manufacturers. India also needs to reform the carbon market to allow factories in, say, Morbi to sell their “avoided emissions” through an emerging carbon credit trading system and use the proceeds to offset the high capital costs of electric furnaces.
Examples Oman, Spain, Denmark
Industries can also benefit from hybrid solutions due to the inherent advantages of being able to upgrade without first decommissioning their existing infrastructure. For example, a CST system can operate during the day, a small gas-based backup system can support peak loads, and induction coils can provide heat for precision processes. The “Miraah” project in Oman offers a useful example: engineers integrated one of the world’s largest concentrated solar thermal plants with an existing gas-burning industrial operation. The solar energy thus generates steam during the day and reduces gas consumption by almost 80%, while the gas boilers were on standby and for nighttime use.
The “Solar Heat for Industrial Processes” initiatives in Spain have allowed Solatom to develop plug-and-play solar thermal units: pre-assembled mirror arrays in containers that a factory can install on a roof or a small parking lot and connect directly to its existing steam network. Denmark has reformed its energy market to encourage heat purchase contracts, where an external provider installs and maintains a CST or induction system and the factory simply buys the heat at a fixed rate, usually cheaper than gas; the government has also supported the initiative by investing in large-capacity thermal storage tanks that will hold “excess” heat for several days. Such solutions significantly reduce engineering costs for new users.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
Published – 12 March 2026 07:30 IST
