India’s energy crisis and ways to resolve it.

At least 300 million of India’s 1.25 billion people live without electricity, as the villagers of Appapur
(telangana) did until a year ago. Another quarter-billion or so get only spotty power from India’s
decrepit grid, finding it available for as little as three or four hours a day. The lack of power affects
rural and urban areas alike, limiting efforts to advance both living standards and the country’s
manufacturing sector.

If current trends continue and India follows the traditional path in which emissions increase
as living standards rise, it will be disastrous not only for Indians but for the entire planet. By
way of illustration, consider what’s happened in China. From 1980 to 2010, while the
country’s per capita GDP grew by $193, to $4,514, its emissions per capita grew from 1.49
tons per year to more than six tons per year (these figures come from the World Bank and the
CAIT Climate Data Explorer, maintained by the World Resources Institute). China is now the
world’s largest emitter of carbon. India’s per capita emissions as of 2014, the last year for
which figures are available, were 1.73 tons per year, and its 2017 GDP was $7,170 per
person. Its population is expected to grow by another 400 million people over the next three
decades, bringing it to 1.7 billion by 2050. If India follows a path similar to China’s, that will
add another eight billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere each year—more than total U.S.
emissions in 2013.

Such growth would easily swamp efforts elsewhere in the world to curtail carbon emissions,
dooming any chance to head off the dire effects of global climate change. (Overall, the world
will need to reduce its current annual emissions of 40 billion tons by 40 to 70 percent
between now and 2050.) By 2050, India will have roughly 20 percent of the world’s
population. If those people rely heavily on fossil fuels such as coal to expand the economy
and raise their living standards to the level people in the rich world have enjoyed for the last
50 years, the result will be a climate catastrophe regardless of anything the United States or
even China does to decrease its emissions. Reversing these trends will require radical
transformations in two main areas: how India produces electricity, and how it distributes it.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took charge in May 2014, he has made universal access
to electricity a key part of his administration’s ambitions. At the same time, he has pledged to
help lead international efforts to limit climate change. Among other plans, he has promised to
increase India’s renewable-energy capacity to 175 gigawatts, including 100 gigawatts of
solar, by 2022. (That’s about the total power generation capacity of Germany.) And therein
lies India’s energy dilemma.

Already the world’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, India
is attempting to do something no nation has ever done: build a modern industrialized
economy, and bring light and power to its entire population, without dramatically increasing
carbon emissions. Simply to keep up with rising demand for electricity, it must add around 15
gigawatts each year over the next 30 years. The country gets most of its electricity from
aging, dirty coal-fired plants. (It has little domestic production of oil or natural gas.) And its
energy infrastructure is in dismal shape. The obsolescence of its power grid was
demonstrated by a massive 2012 outage that left more than 600 million people in the dark and
drew attention to a utility sector in disarray, with an estimated $70 billion of accumulated
debt.

Piyush Goyal Minister of State with Independent Charge for Power, Coal and New &
Renewable Energy has emerged as a champion of renewable energy, calling for investments
of $100 billion in renewables and another $50 billion in upgrading the country’s faltering
 India’s energy crisis and ways to resolve it.

grid. Almost every week he appears in the newspapers cutting the ribbon on a new solar
power plant or wind farm or hydropower installation. grid. Almost every week he appears in
the newspapers cutting the ribbon on a new solar power plant or wind farm or hydropower
installation.

India consumes around 800 million tons of coal a year and could more than double that
number by 2035, according to the World Energy Outlook from BP. To meet that demand, and
to limit coal imports, Goyal plans to increase domestic coal production to 1.5 billion tons a
year by 2020, from 2015 levels of 660 million tons. “Increasing domestic production of coal
will be a big step towards long-term energy security of India,” he said in a January tweet.

Almost 70 percent of India’s electricity today comes from coal-fired plants. About 17 percent
comes from hydropower, much of it from large dams in the northeast. Another 3.5 percent
comes from nuclear. That leaves about 10 percent, depending on daily conditions, from
renewables—mostly wind farms.

The response from Modi and Goyal has been to embark upon the world’s most aggressive
capacity-building program for low-carbon power generation. It was soon after taking office
that Modi announced he would seek to add 100 gigawatts of solar power capacity by 2022.
(India has about four gigawatts of solar capacity today.) Fifty-seven gigawatts of the planned
new capacity is supposed to come in the form of utility-scale solar, including so-called “ultra
mega” projects, ranging in size from 500 megawatts up to 10 gigawatts. “Ultra mega” hardly
does justice to the scale of such gargantuan parks; the world’s largest solar plant, the Desert
Sunlight plant in California’s Mojave Desert, is 550 megawatts. Twenty-five of these huge
projects are due to come online by 2019, supported by 40.5 billion rupees ($649 million) in
central-government funding—a paltry sum given that Desert Sunlight cost more than $1.5
billion to build. (In 2012, when Modi was chief minister of the state of Gujarat, he presided
over the launch of the world’s largest solar installation: a group of plants totaling nearly one
gigawatt combined.) Another 75 gigawatts of wind capacity is also planned. together, these
additions would boost India’s renewable capacity from around 10 percent of the total to as
much as 32 percent.

At the same time, the government plans a program of building nuclear plants that would
roughly triple capacity by 2024 and supply one-quarter of the country’s electricity needs by
2050. Foreign companies are lining up to invest in India’s renewable–energy sector

Today, it’s requiring new buildings to be solar-equipped and deploying entrepreneurial

distribution models that bypass the broken utilities. Tomorrow, it could be relying on
concentrated solar for small factories, or small nuclear reactors, or some other generation and
distribution model that has yet to emerge. (Softbank, of Japan, recently announced it will
invest $20 billion in solar projects in India).