India seeks to scale up renewable power

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has moved to quickly scale up its use of renewable power.In 2014, the year Modi took office, India had 3 gigawatts of solar power.Bythe end of 2017, it had nearly 7 times that, or 20GW, according toindustry tracker Bridge to India, a renewable energy consultancy.NowIndia wants to quintuple that total by 2022 — a goal once seen ashugely ambitious but now considered within reach by energy experts.Progress is clearly happening quickly: During 2017 alone, India doubled its installed solar capacity from 10GW to 20GW.“India is going to maintain and accelerate the momentum.Itwill move to be the number two player in the next year or two,” saidTim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the Australia-basedInstitute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a thinktank.In 2017, India added the third largest amount of national solarcapacity, just behind the US and China, and was overtaking Japan,according to IEEFA research.Now, in partnership with France, Indiawants to take its growing resources and knowledge on solar power and useit to help other sunny countries jumpstart their solar ambitions aswell.On Sunday, in New Delhi, Modi and the French President EmmanuelMacron hosted the launch of a solar energy partnership that aims tobuild a network to help tropical countries around the world boost theiruse of solar power.“In the Vedas (ancient Hindu texts), the sun was thought to be the world’s soul.InIndia, the sun was thought of as the nurturer of all life,” Modi saidat the launch of the International Solar Alliance (ISA).“These days, when we are looking for a way to combat climate change, we must look to this ancient perspective,” he said.Aspart of the alliance, India will offer financial support to help with27 solar projects in other countries, the prime minister said.Macron said France also will commit 700mn euros to the alliance.Upendra Tripathy, the director general of the new alliance, said it aims scale-up solar power in many more countries.“Everyonehas access to (the sun) but in terms of ability to exploit solarenergy, (that) is not equal,” he said in a telephone interview with theThomson Reuters Foundation.“Credit is a challenge. Skillset is achallenge. The fundamental issue is, do all member countries have equalability to exploit solar energy?”ISA plans to address that issue inpart by creating a larger, global market for solar technology that wouldbenefit smaller countries by aggregating the risk and the demand,Tripathy said.The alliance, an effort to advance the 2015 Paris climate agreement, aims to become a network of 121 countries, he said.Currently 32 countries are full members and another 61 are on their way to full membership.Many are developing nations.India’s solar push is in part boosted by steadily dropping costs of providing solar energy.Toproduce a unit of solar power now costs Rs2.5 — a cost similar to thatof more traditional energy sources, said Kanika Chawla, the seniorprogramme lead at the Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment andWater, a partner organisation of the ISA.India’s transition torenewable energy — without shutting down its coal-fired power plants —represents a new model for developing countries going forward, Chawlasaid in a telephone interview.But India still gets aboutthree-quarters of its power from coal, although that is expected to fallto below 50% by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency.India’spower providers, largely state-run public companies, are heavily indebt and as a result many companies generating solar power are not beingpaid on time, Chawla said.India’s government also is considering a70% tariff on solar imports to protect India’s solar manufacturers —something that is causing a lot of uncertainty as investors try to bringnew solar projects into the country, Buckley said.Other issues forthe nation’s solar scale-up include the tricky business of figuring outhow to integrate renewables into the existing electricity grid and thelack of a business model for such utilities — a problem other countriesusing solar energy also face, Chawla said.All of these issues havecontributed to a slowdown in the pace at which solar projects are beingcommissioned in India, she said.But what the renewable energy future holds for the South Asian giant will be critical for the world, climate change experts say.As China’s economic growth slows, India’s is heating up, along with its energy demand.India is today the top contributor to growth in energy demand, according to the International Energy Agency.“It’sworth acknowledging the Indian market and economy is stillsignificantly smaller than China and it will be for some time to come,”Buckley said.However, “India is very much wedded to the energytransformation. It’s coming straight from the Prime Minister, and theenergy minister and the coal minister are very much onboard,” he said.And“especially with the US leaving the Paris agreement, there’s aperceived void that some country needs to fill — and the InternationalSolar Alliance is a clever way of signalling climate leadership”, Chawlasaid. “It is India’s offering to the world.” — Thomson ReutersFoundation