Context: Recently, NITI Aayog and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) released a report namely “Towards a Clean Energy Economy: Post-COVID-19 Opportunities for India’s Energy and Mobility Sectors”.
Key Points

• The NITI Aayog and RMI report advocates for stimulus and recovery efforts that work towards building a clean, resilient, and least-cost energy future for India.
• These efforts include electric vehicle, energy storage, and renewable energy programs.
• The report identifies how Covid-19 is beginning to influence the clean energy transition in India, specifically for the transport and power sectors, and recommends principles and strategic opportunities for the country’s leaders to drive economic recovery and maintain momentum towards a clean energy economy.

Way Forward for India’s Clean Energy:

• Clean energy will be a major driver of India’s economic recovery and international competitiveness, and working to leverage India’s domestic innovation ecosystem will bring value to the country and industry.

The report lays out four principles as a framework for policymakers and other key decision-makers considering programmes to support India’s clean energy future:

• Invest in least-cost-energy solutions,
• Support resilient and secure energy systems,
• Prioritize efficiency and competitiveness, and
• Promote social and environmental equity.
• India needs to identify strategic opportunities for economic recovery in the short, medium, and long terms that can translate challenges posed by the pandemic into clean energy transition opportunities.

Opportunities in Transport and Power Sector

• Opportunities in the transport sector include making public transport safe, enhancing and expanding non-motorized transport infrastructure, reducing vehicle kilometres travelled through work-from-home where possible, supporting national strategies to adopt electric vehicles in the freight and passenger segments, and making India an automotive export hub.
• The report states that India’s transport sector can save 1.7 gigatonnes of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and avoid about 600 million tonnes of oil equivalent in fuel demand by 2030 through shared, electric, and connected passenger mobility and cost-effective, clean, and optimized freight transport.
• In the power sector, opportunities include improving the electricity distribution business and its operations, enabling renewables and distributed energy resources, and promoting energy resilience and local manufacturing of renewable energy and energy storage technologies.