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Interview | Fixing Taxi Fares, Bajaj CNG Bikes, Maruti Shares, Hot Money
How will CNG bikes change the two-wheeler industry if it succeeds? Shyamasis Das shares his insights.Simulating the Socio-Economy-Environment Impacts of Ecotaxes in India: An...
Pricing carbon, either directly or indirectly, provides a price incentive to producers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, it is important to examine the impact of such governmental policies on the economy, emissions, and particularly households, who will bear the incidence of such taxes.Compensating for the Fiscal Loss in India’s Energy Transition
The study argues for the need to consider multiple factors, including efficiency, equity, sustainability, institutional considerations, and the possibility of reducing expenditures on non-essential goods.Going Green in India: Balancing Energy Security and the Energy Transition
This essay examines India’s energy security in the short and medium term and finds that development needs will drive the country’s energy policy, which balances energy security with the energy transition.Interview | Are Indian OEMs Shying Away from the Biofuel Push?
What prevents India's original equipment manufacturers (OEM) from transitioning to flex engines? Shyamasis Das discusses the challenges faced, including the high cost of flex engines.Properly Defining “Green Electricity” is Key to India’s Broader...
Rahul Tongia highlights the complexities of green supply and green consumption. More RE is inevitable and welcome. Better accounting and signalling (such as time-of-day and congestion pricing) can help grow RE at lower overall system costs.Podcast | Should India Consider Phasing Out Nuclear Power?
There are questions on whether nuclear power, with its attendant concerns on cost and safety, remains a relevant option for a future that is fossil-free, particularly in India.Natural Gas: The Bridge on India’s Path to Energy Atmanirbharta
India has a long way to go before it can fully wean itself off fossil fuels. During this transitional phase, gas producers should be granted unfettered marketing and pricing freedom.Modelling the Impact of the Clean Environment Cess: A Hybrid Energy...
Rajat Verma and Ganesh Sivamani's paper seeks to measure the impact of this cess on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the gross domestic product (GDP) at both the sectoral and national levels.The Road to Energy Atmanirbharta
Leadership to balance short-term pressures of elections with longer-term imperatives of sustainability is needed, writes Vikram Singh Mehta.Potential of Lower Costs of Capital for Faster Decarbonisation in...
The study by Rahul Tongia focuses on ways to encourage the energy transition for developing countries where high costs of capital are a factor in keeping a spread between fossil fuel technologies and non-carbon solutions.Why India needs a Ministry of Energy
It would not alter the existing roles and responsibilities of the various ministries that oversee petroleum, coal, renewables and power, but would identify and handle all of the issues that currently fall between the cracks created by the existing structure.Book Review | Betting on natural gas as a ‘clean’ fossil fuel
Bibek Bhattacharya reviews The Next Stop for Mint, focusing on natural gas' role in India's decarbonisation and its limitationsThe great leap to clean energy
Vivek Rae reviews The Next Stop: Natural Gas and India's Journey to a Clean Energy Future.A low-carbon future through sector-led change
In India, a sector-led, action-based approach could provide the framework to drive low-carbon transformation.Challenges for natural gas to become India’s bridge fuel: Economics,...
This paper examines the possibilities for natural gas in India’s energy mix, both through the lens of competitive economic viability as well as the impact its use might have, notably, on carbon emissions.Road to decarbonisation: Govts must remove obstacles of poorly designed...
Decarbonisation has become a buzzword. To ensure it does not remain just that but translates into effective action on the ground, policymakers will have to build structures that reflect the woven, multidimensional, interdependent and interconnected nature of the energy ecosystem.New electricity consumer rules: Reading the impact on ‘rooftop solar’...
The older regime benefited just a handful. The new rules should spur a conversation on equitable and sustainable pricing frameworksIndia’s energy transition: Coal is down but not out
The coal transition is already underway. There may be a lot of uncertainty, but what is even more certain is that the future will not look like the past – and it shouldn’t. The future should be cleaner, more inclusive, more efficient, and more secure, not to mention cost-effective.DisComs post-COVID-19: Untangling the historical challenges, needs, and...
COVID has unleashed a relatively unique global pandemic with economic, human, and institutional upheavals that haven’t been seen in generations. Economies are in a tailspin, and employment has been one of the biggest casualties beyond direct human health. The collapse of both liquidity and economic activity hits DisComs harder than many other ...How to hasten the energy transition in the developing world
Emerging economies are expected to experience the highest growth in energy demand in the coming decades, mostly because they are starting from a low or modest base. This means their future energy trajectories must be at an intersection of inclusive, affordable, and sustainable growth. However, for all the potential that advanced energy technologies ...Transition to electric vehicles in Karnataka and India: What’s real,...
The recent policy push for electrifying mobility in India has spurred a host of national and sub-national policies, private sector investment in technology and infrastructure, and business models piloted or deployed in the electric vehicles (EV) segment. Many plans are based on targets or manufacturing, and there are few conversations about holistic ...Electrifying mobility in India
India’s electric vehicles' (EV) aspirations are steep from where we stand today, but they have sparked remarkable interest and action in policy, industry and research arenas.Is future planning of electricity grid keeping India’s pace of...
A seminar and discussion at Brookings India recently focused on the impact of electrification on the electricity demand growth and also included insights from global experiences and the possible policy implications for India. Key speaker at this event was Johannes Urpelainen of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Founding Director ...An uncertain energy future
The government faces a renewable energy trilemma. It has set itself a target of quadrupling the generation capacity of solar energy by 2022 and shifting the production of new automotive vehicles from the internal combustion model to electric vehicles (EV) by 2030. In parallel, it wants the clean energy industry to develop ...Making a smart energy grid work for India
Newspapers are showcasing the dramatically lower costs of solar power, reportedly cheaper than coal power now, and we are told that smart grids (and smart cities) are just around the corner. While enormous strides have been made in making these solutions both available and cheaper, we have to focus on the next ...Clean energy can cement Indo-US ties
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Washington, US President Donald Trump and he will find numerous areas of disagreement. High on that list will be climate change. Early this month, Trump put a stick in the eye of the world by announcing that he will pull the US out of the ...Data management: India needs agency for energy data
India has no central body for maintaining and disseminating energy data, let alone analysing it. We propose the creation of a national Energy Information Agency to replace the current patchwork of systems. This would collect, standardize and analyse data across energy domains and make it publicly available. A lack of robust data ...Save me, technology; for I have (energy) sinned
Many things demand a balance, energy being one of them. Electricity, in fact, must always be in balance as grid power cannot easily be stored. Unfortunately, in recent times the emphasis has shifted from reducing the demand of power in India through efficiency to increasing its supply. Except for limited examples such ...India’s Updated (2016) Renewable Energy “Guidelines”:...
The government has announced a number of targets and support mechanisms for renewable energy (RE). Almost two years ago, the central government announced plans to grow to 175 GW of RE capacity by 2022, more than a five-fold growth in just seven years. RE has since been supported through a number of ...Planning for Accelerating Smart Meter and Smart Grid Rollouts in India
The Electricity Policy has taken a bold move to kick-start Smart Meters in India. This discussion note discusses roll-out the options. Many HT consumers are already on digital metering, that too with downloading of data (even if via a handheld instrument). Making such users’ metering “smart” will be analogous to AMR (automated ...Smart is as smart does
A few years ago, smart grids were all the rage Amitabh Bachchan was even on the cover of a business magazine in 2010 with a Smart Meter, and was dubbed “Power Genie”. Given, however, the low percentage of Smart Meter rollouts across homes, we have to be wary of Gartner’s famous Hype ...Shaping India’s energy future: Ambitions, actions and obstacles
Multi-domain, multi-scale, and multi-stakeholder efforts are needed to overcome the combination of acute and chronic challenges facing India’s energy future. Analogies aren’t perfect, but a number from the healthcare domain could apply to energy. Doctors often characterize diseases or conditions as acute or chronic – energy faces both sets of challenges. In ...Smart Grids in India: Separating Hype from Hope
Rahul Tongia discusses why Smart Grids in India have become a distinct possibility, instead of a science experiment, and why they can succeed now.
Energy 2030: Backgrounder
This backgrounder – prepared for the Petrotech 2014 CEO Conclave held in New Delhi, on December 17, 2013 – looks at the dynamics of energy demand and supply in 2030, the implications of geopolitical stress on energy trade, and provides a framework for a sustainable energy agenda in 2030. Key Insights: ...