Publications : All
Topic
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.Interview | Is India’s plan to buy 10,000 electric buses enough?
Shyamasis Das discusses India’s plan to buy 10,000 electric buses on the Business Standard Morning Show.Historical Wind Power in Karnataka Differs from Predictive Models: A...
Marty Shwarz and Rahul Tongia examine the performance of wind power across climatology, technology, and location.Sustained Cost Declines in Solar PV and Battery Storage Needed to...
The results of this research describe the challenging technological and policy advances needed to achieve the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.Preparing for a Green Energy Shift in 2022
The ‘irresistible force’ for clean energy has met the ‘immovable object’ of an embedded fossil fuel energy system. How can policies reconcile this paradox?India Can Grow and Cut Emissions at the Same Time
Montek Singh Ahluwalia unpacks the strategy policymakers could adopt for India's decarbonisation.Can we Offer a Credible Strategy for the Reduction of Emissions?
Let’s present CoP-26 a carbon-reduction strategy that includes adequate access to finance, writes Montek Singh Ahluwalia.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 limitationsCan natural gas be a ‘bridge’ fuel in India’s energy transition?
India’s focus for natural gas should be where it displaces coal, especially 'dirty', inefficient coalWhat will be the impact of scrappage policy on India’s EV market?
India’s vehicle scrappage policy introduced in the 2021 budget session aims at replacing end-of-life vehicles (ELV).Coal power plants need an integrated approach
The three issues — retirement, pollution control, and making plants flexible — are inter-related. They need to be addressed in an integrated fashion by distribution companies.Skewed critical minerals global supply chains post COVID-19
Introduction While there is rich extant literature on India’s dependence on and its long-term need for natural gas and coal, there is not a similar understanding of non-fuel minerals, particularly the critical minerals. A study by the Department of Science and Technology and the Council on Energy, Environment, and Water (DST-CEEW, 2016) ...How COVID-19 might impact India’s renewable energy transition
India, like other countries, had an ongoing energy transition, but the question becomes will COVID-19 create a pause or a shift in the trajectories? Or, will it induce radical change? No one can know for sure, in part because we don’t know what the “new normal” will be, but also because timeframes ...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 ...Understanding India’s Power Capacity: Surplus or not, and for how...
Abstract For the first time, India has sufficient or even surplus electricity generation capacity. Headline numbers show India’s gross installed electricity capacity is over 350 GW, but the maximum load met has been approximately 180 GW. Does this mean we have sufficient buffer for years to come? A significant fraction of this ...India 2024: A clean India
India continues to suffer from a number of systemic challenges, many dating back decades, when it comes to governance, the delivery of services, and financial sustainability. The next government should focus its efforts on a few areas. Cut Out Middlemen Today, a major scourge on governance in India – including in the ...Complexities of integrating Renewable Energy into India’s grid
In 2014, India unilaterally announced plans to quadruple Renewable Energy (RE) to 175 GW by 2022, an ambitious target that required an annual growth (CAGR) of over 25 percent. Since then, growth has exploded, especially for grid-scale solar power, which is meant to be 100 of the 175 GW RE targeted. Until ...Renewable Energy “versus” coal in India – A false framing as...
Comparing Renewable Energy and Coal A number of publications proclaim Renewable Energy (RE) is cheaper than coal. A newspaper will often show two cost curves, a rising one for coal, and a falling one for RE, especially solar (Figure 1). At some point they cross-over, an intersection dubbed “grid parity”. It’s a ...Working to turn ambition into reality
Executive Summary Even before signing the Paris climate agreement, the Indian government announced extremely ambitious renewable energy (RE) targets that would quadruple the country’s RE capacity between late 2014 and 2022, to 175 gigawatts (GW).1 From India’s relatively small RE base, this target implies annual growth of 25 percent a targeted buildout ...Embarrassment of riches? The rise of RE in India and steps to manage...
Does India have ‘too much’ electricity capacity? Every electricity grid operates in a balance between supply and demand, usually with a slight surplus of capacity to meet eventualities and uncertainty too much surplus becomes expensive. Surplus has two sides: either the demand is lower than projected, or supply is higher than required ...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 ...Renewable Energy Forecasting in India – Not a simple case of ‘more...
Growing Renewable Energy (RE) means a greater increase in variability of supply, a relatively newer phenomenon for grids where demand was the usual variable, and supply was tightly controlled, or ‘despatchable’. One cannot control the wind or sun, but one at least needs to predict it well, so that the rest of ...Challenges ahead for clean energy
Who doesn’t want clean or ‘green’ energy? But what if this costs a bit more? We might quickly find many people’s appetite for renewable energy (RE) is lower, especially if the worry cited is something as invisible, long-term, and global as CO2 emissions that impact climate change. RE is making enormous progress ...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 ...No such thing as a perfect renewable energy contract
India’s 175 GW renewable energy (RE) targets by 2022 are ambitious, to say the least. Compared to RE targets in Europe, China, or California that require 4-5% growth in RE capacity annually, Indian targets require 25% growth. This translates to enormous capital investment (well over $100 billion), including from global investors. RE ...How India can meet its ambitious renewable energy targets
A systemic approach that focuses on enabling the environment for more renewable energy will help India to meet its target of generating 175 gigawatts of energy by 2021. At the recently concluded Marrakesh Conference, most countries stood by their commitments made in Paris at COP21 for reducing carbon emissions. India’s ratification, on ...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 ...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 ...Brightening the future with the sun and wind
India received commitments for over 260,000 MW of renewable energy during RE-Invest. While this is a great supply-side achievement, there are several issues in terms of handling this, and implications for the grid, both technically and financially. The Renewable Energy (RE) Global Investor’s Meet inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on February ...India-U.S. Energy Cooperation: Moving to Green, Clean and Smart
The U.S. is the second largest energy consumer in the world, and India is soon to become the third. The U.S. already has a large consumption base; India has enormous growth ahead of it given the low per capita levels of energy consumption (an order of magnitude lower than the U.S.). This ...No Imminent Renewables “Death Spiral” for India’s...
Rahul Tongia explains the challenges facing utility companies in India from distributed generation of renewables and a tiered pricing system in need of reform.Why Renewable Energy Is Harder in India than in Other Countries
Rahul Tongia discusses the challenges of renewable energy sources in India and offers recommendations to help better integrate renewables into the grid.