India’s green energy plan worth $20 billion business sense: PM Modi – Times of India

NEW DELHI: Universal access to electricity, the government’s “commitment and conviction” to fight climate change along with plans to rapidly expand renewable energy capacity will generate business prospects worth $20 billion, or Rs 1.5 lakh crore, every year, prime minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday urging investors to join India’s renewable energy programme.
“Today, every village and almost every household in India have access to electricity. Tomorrow, their energy demand will increase. Thus, demand for energy in India will keep growing. There are huge renewable energy deployment plans for the next decade. This is a big opportunity to invest in India,” he said inaugurating ‘RE-Invest 2020’, the third global renewable energy showcase for investors hosted by India.
“India’s renewable power capacity is the fourth-largest in the world. It is growing at the fastest speed among all major countries,” he said underlining the upside of India’s renewable energy market. India currently has 136 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy capacity, which is about 36 per cent of the total installed capacity. This is to increase to 220 GW by 2035.
India has attracted almost Rs 5 lakh crore, or over $64 billion, investment in the renewable energy sector during the last six years. “We want to make India a global manufacturing hub in the renewable energy sector,” he said adding the country offered “a very liberal foreign investment policy” for renewables.
The PM made it clear that renewables will be at the core of India’s energy matrix by saying the focus is on innovative bids for 24X7 green power to overcome intermittency, the main barrier to making solar or wind power projects mainstays since battery storage is still economically unviable in large applications.
“Our annual renewable energy capacity addition has been exceeding that of coal-based thermal power since 2017. In the last six years, we increased our installed renewable energy capacity by two-and-a-half times,” he said, adding the installed solar energy capacity has increased 13 times during this period.
“India’s progress in the field of renewable energy is an outcome of our commitment and conviction in fighting climate change. Even when it was not affordable, we invested in renewable energy. Now our investment and scale are bringing costs down. We are showing to the world that sound environmental policies can also be sound economics. Today, India is among the very few countries to be on track to achieve the 2 degree compliance goal,” the PM said.