Publications : Opinion & Commentary
Topic
Putting the Cart Before the Horse
While public policy can provide the requisite nudge for EV adoption, a poorly designed one like the ‘Delhi Motor Vehicle Aggregator and Delivery Service Provider Scheme, 2023’ (“Scheme”) can lead to suboptimal results at best and be counterproductive at worst.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.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.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 ...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 ...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 ...