TERI launches report on Roadmap to India’s 2030 decarbonization target

New Delhi: Union Power Minister RK Singh has said that by 2030, the total capacity for power production will be reached at 820GW and out of that, more than 500GW will be non-fossil.  

“India has already started adding storage capacity to renewable energy in the country” R K Singh said in an event organized by TERI, during which a discussion paper  on “Roadmap to India’s 2030 Decarbonization target” was also released. 

The Minister said “We have come out with one of the largest bids on storage. We are trying to bring down the price of storage by adding volume.”

The report examines the challenges in achieving the ambitious 2030 targets and discusses feasible pathways for achieving these.

At COP26, India announced the highly ambitious goal of decarbonizing energy to 50 per cent and achieving 500 GW of fossil fuel free generating capacity by 2030. 

Speaking about the government’s target, Director General of TERI Vibha Dhawan said “The government has made ambitious strides in reinforcing India’s climate leadership and its commitment to showcase a low carbon pathway.” 

“While India has the right policy regime in place, we need to adopt new Energy Storage solutions and technologies which bring stability and flexibility to the grid. This would bring renewables to the core of the power mix,” Dr Dhawan added.

Sharing the key suggestions from the paper, Mr Ajay Shankar, distinguished Fellow, TERI, said, “No one expected the gigantic increase in India’s NDC ambitions at Glasgow last year. This begs the question – Can we do it?” 

“While working on the discussion paper we found out that India can achieve these targets without straining government finances by gently tweaking our approach towards development, said Mr Shankar.

“Rural India will be key to expanding our RE potential. In the wind sector, we need to start offshore development irrespective of the capital investment to get the industry going, he added.

Setting the context at the launch event,  AK axena, Senior Director, TERI said, “While the targets set by the Prime Minister at COP26 are ambitious, we can achieve them given a well-planned roadmap, something that we have tried to chart out in our discussion paper.” 

India is now committed to the energy transition of decarbonisation and achieving a state of net zero emission.

The report said, “The highly ambitious goals announced at COP26, Glasgow of having 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity and meeting 50% of energy requirements from renewables by 2030 are achievable but this would be very challenging”.

“It may well turn out to be a lower cost pathway for meeting growing energy demand and thus, serving the socio-economic imperatives of a developing country” said the paper. It also talked about the installation of renewables, at very rapidly. 

“Larger shares of variable renewable energy  need greater flexibility and resilience in grid management, creation of large scale storage would be essential for providing this resilience and also for fully utilizing the huge increase in solar power generation” It said.

Fortunately, solar power with storage has now become cheaper than electricity from new thermal power plants.

India has made remarkable progress in recent years. It now has the 5th largest solar and 4th largest wind power capacity in the world, with their total capacity being over 100 GW.

Though the share of renewables in total electricity generation is now over 10 per cent more than 70 per cent of the country’s electricity was still generated by fossil fuels in 2021.