India’s HDI is 0.64, placing it at a rank of 130 among 189 countries. Despite being one of the fastest growing economies of the world, nearly 12 % of the households still do not have access to basic services like clean water and 52% of the households live in mud or semi- concrete houses. Even in 2011/12, 52 % households used firewood for cooking.

• India’s per capita electricity consumption was about a fourth of the global average while its per capita energy consumption was around one-fifth of the global average in 2015/16.
  • This reflects a combination of the prevailing energy access and affordability issues.
  • Accordingly, India still needs to significantly improve its development infrastructure towards achieving higher levels of well-being for its population.
• Historically, the developed countries accounted for the larger pan of the global emissions as they industrialised and developed their infrastructure earlier.
• In recent years, as economic growth picked up in the non-OECD countries, the share of OECD and non-OECD emissions has reversed.
• India and China accounted for 55% of non-OECD emissions with China contributing to 44 per cent and India accounting for 11 per cent in 2017.
• India’s GHG emissions (excluding land use change and forestry) increased by nearly 115 per cent between 1994 and 2014,

Need for emission mitigation:

The world would require rapid and far reaching transitions at the global as well as national levels. Therefore it is clear that while rapid and inclusive development is clearly an overriding priority for the country on one hand, the global responsibility and pressure on India to grow sustainably is also significant as the urgency to address climate change issues is assuming increasing importance globally.

What makes India’s current energy transition unique?

• Energy transition is by no means a new concept for India — the country has had a history of transitioning to different energy choices based on the stage of the country’s development and main national priorities.
• In the initial years of national planning following India’s independence, the primary focus was on socio-economic development and energy policies focused on supply adequacy and infrastructure development.
• In the years that followed, the energy sector witnessed a gradual transition away from traditional use of biomass to modern energy forms like coal and petroleum products.
• The 5-Year Plans shifted their focus from issues ofe nergy access in the 1970s, to that of national energy security in the 1980s and modernization of energy infrastructure in the 1990s.
• During these years, the energy sector witnessed a transition towards higher levels of electrification and an increase in the share of thermal power generation.
• Increasingly, the understanding of energy security also evolved to include aspects of access, affordability and efficiency rather than being seen in a narrow sense of only national self-sufficiency.
• India’s Eleventh (2007-2012) and Twelfth Plan (2012- 17) presented the broad vision and aspiration of a faster, sustainable, and more inclusive growth and priority to environmental sustainability.
• The key elements of India’s current transition story need to relate with enhancing efficiency in the energy system to dampen the growth in future energy requirements and to simultaneously transition towards cleaner energy forms.
• Accordingly, we are now witnessing the era of the transition to new renewables like solar and wind energy.

Given the global urgency to tackle climate change, following the Paris Agreement in 2015, India had set out its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) targets for 2030, which broadly have three main targets,

1. Reducing the emissions intensity Of its GDP by 33 per cent-35 per cent from 2005 levels.
2. Achieving 40 per cent cumulative electric power installed capacity based on non-fossil energy sources, contingent on international transfer of technology and low cost finance.
3. Creating an additional carbon sink of 2.5 – 3.0 billion tonnes of CO equivalent through additional forest and tree cover.

• Moving towards renewables such as solar power is a “win-win” option for India given the abundance of sunshine in the country and the rapid development of solar technologies that has resulted in a rapid plummeting down of renewable based electricity costs in recent times.
• The cost of renewables (especially solar) has decreased rapidly, making it fairly competitive with fossil based generation.
• It is expected that renewable electricity (with storage) would attain large scale commercial viability by 2030, thereby overcoming the intermittency challenges (for wind and solar power).
• Moreover, it is clear that as the electricity sector gets increasingly decarbonised, it could augur well for India to move towards electrification of end-uses such as cooking and mobility.
• Leapfrogging to electric cook-stoves judiciously in some cases could bring in greater benefits in terms of moving to a low carbon path rather than first making a transition towards LPG/ PNG in an effort to move to cleaner modern fuels.
• Similarly, if the country could make a quick move to electric vehicles directly, it could also simultaneously address the issue of local air pollution in cities.

Challenges:

• Sustainable energy options often entail high upfront capital costs for setting up the associated infrastructure. Therefore, the financial requirements of these alternatives need to be carefully considered especially if they need to be adopted at larger scales.
• It is important that the country does not compromise on development related spending while proceeding towards a low carbon pathway. Alternative and additional sources of finance should be tapped to ensure that both objectives can be pursued synergistically.
• Accelerating the pace of electrification of vehicles could prove to be detrimental unless the power generation sector is already highly decarbonised.
• While technological choices and solutions exist for India’s energy transition, there also exist several challenges that would need to be addressed via suitable policies and measures, keeping India’s socio- economic context in mind.
• Adoption of some efficiency measures may require behavioural changes apart from purely technological solutions, and therefore necessitate ways to motivate consumers to shift to such options through innovative business models and strategies.
• The adoption of renewables at larger scales would also need to be complemented with grid improvements to handle higher share of intermittent/variable power.
• Perhaps the biggest challenge to adoption of energy efficient technologies in the industry sector comes from the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).
  • These being small, un-mechanised and having limited dependence on electricity offer limited avenues of efficiency improvement.
  • They also lack capital and motivation to shift to better processes and technologies because unlike the big industries, they lack the advantage of scale.
• In other cases, such as in the transport sector, there may still be technological gaps in terms of availability of economically viable alternatives.
• While solutions have emerged at the pilot scale to find substitutes for Aviation Turbine Fuel (ATF) used in the aviation sector, and to fuels used in the shipping and heavy road-freight transportation, these solutions are still not readily available for large scale transitions.

Conclusion:

On the one hand, India’s energy transition story needs to address the technology development perspective which calls for enhanced and accelerated efforts to increase the uptake of clean and efficient energy substitutes, processes, and end-use equipment, such that the country does not lock itself into large stocks of inefficient equipment and infrastructure. At the same time, India needs to address the social development perspective wherein it needs to enable a higher standard of living for all the citizens by growing at a relatively higher pace and in a more inclusive way, ensure access to clean and modern energy forms in a reliable and affordable manner for all sections of society, doubling of farm incomes, creation of job opportunities through strengthening of industrial base etc. India must undertake an integrated and holistic approach to use innovative business models and dynamic decision making to address the multiple challenges at the policy and institutional levels or those posed by socio-cultural and market barriers, in order to successfully convert the challenges into opportunities for inclusive growth.