“The entire world is watching us,” said India’s prime minister Narendra Modi in a speech at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai late last year. “Mother Earth is looking toward us to protect her future. We have to succeed.” This call for climate action was meant to be a global one, but it could have applied to India alone, as the world’s most populous country increasingly sets the course for our climate future.
India is now the world’s third largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the US, having taken over the European Union just last year. Under Modi’s government, India has also taken steps to reign in these rising emissions while simultaneously addressing widespread energy poverty.
Renewable energy is booming on the subcontinent. There is – especially two-wheelers – and there are for it to become a green hydrogen powerhouse. With Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) expected to win India’s election, which saw polls open on 19 April with results due on 4 June, the question is what he will do next.
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India’s path to net-zero emissions remains fraught with difficult choices, from how to supply rapidly rising demand for energy while transitioning away from coal power to the risk of a green trade war with China. While India is only responsible for about 3 per cent of the historical emissions driving climate change, its modern emissions mean the course it takes will prove critical if the world is to succeed at avoiding the most dangerous consequences of warming.
Modi’s climate record began in 2015, just a year after he first came to power, when India joined the Paris Agreement, the global pledge to hold global warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Since then, Modi’s administration has become the first Indian government to set specific national climate targets. The main one, announced in 2021, is for India to reach net-zero emissions by 2070. That is a decade slower than China’s net-zero target and two decades behind the US, but many see this as justified given India’s small share of past emissions.
India’s slower approach to decarbonisation also reflects the fact that its per capita emissions are low, at less than half the global average. These are many of whom lack access to sufficient energy. “The people that don’t have access to power right now are not responsible for climate change,” says at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank in New Delhi.
We can expect India’s emissions to rise as more people gain access to energy and use more of it – under current policy, the International Energy Agency (IEA) a 50 per cent rise in India’s emissions by 2040, enough to entirely offset the expected decline in Europe’s emissions over that period. One quickly rising source of demand is the need to power air conditioners amid rising temperatures. The scorching heat as voters now head to the polls has power operators .
In the next two decades, the IEA estimates that India will have expand its power capacity by the equivalent used across the EU today. To do that while limiting emissions, Modi has promised to build renewable energy at a rapid clip. In 2021, he pledged to build 175 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2022 and 500 gigawatts by 2030. India missed the, but a record amount of renewable capacity has been built in India since then. It now makes up just under a third of India’s total capacity, although progress varies widely between states.
Solar in particular has boomed. Between March 2023 and March 2024, around 15 gigawatts of solar capacity came online – a record amount. However, this pace is still far off the 50 gigawatts of additions needed each year to reach the 2030 renewable energy target.
As in other countries, lack of energy storage needed to integrate more intermittent sources onto the grid is a major bottleneck, as are the improvements needed to the grid itself, says at E3G, an energy think tank. Negotiating land availability for building renewable energy is a serious constraint in densely populated and democratic India. Access to finance is also more expensive than in higher-income countries.
“I think the biggest challenge is availability of funds,” says Singh. A from Ember, a UK think tank, found that India or international sources need to invest an additional $100 billion over the next eight years for India to stay on track with net-zero scenarios.
Availability of materials is also an issue. So far, India’s solar boom has relied heavily on imported solar panels from China, but and other tensions between the two countries have made those more expensive to obtain. India has sought to establish a domestic solar industry, to mixed success.
Another challenge is managing different consequences of the energy transition for India’s poorer, coal-rich east and the country’s prosperous south and west, where most of the new renewable energy is being built. As coal is eventually phased out, states in the east will need more support, says Singh. “We need to rehabilitate the people who have been dependent on coal for so long.”
For the moment, however, India’s coal industry looks set for a robust future. According to a recent Global Energy Monitor , India is second only to China in new coal power under consideration, with 46 gigawatts planned (China has 268 gigawatts in the pipeline). Modi’s administration approved those plans and has also extended the life of many coal plants. In the past year, India produced a record nearly. “Coal is something I think we are going to live with at least to 2040,” says Singh.
Other options that have helped the US and EU reduce coal generation, such as liquefied natural gas, are likely to be too expensive for India, says Joshi. “India’s transition is coal to clean, versus coal to clean via gas.”
But there is debate among energy experts in India about how much new coal power generation is needed to meet rising energy demand, says at Ember. A combination of renewables, storage and existing plants running at full capacity may be enough, but the challenge is meeting peak energy demand at night when people are at home and solar generation is low, he says. “How does a politician answer for peak shortage and still garner support for renewables?”
Heatwaves in both 2022 and 2023 led to power shortages, prompting announcements from politicians about plans for new coal plants. Many of those schemes may be scrapped, but we won’t know until both the election and the summer heat are through. As ever, the long-term demands of tackling climate change can be at odds with short-term political horizons. “You don’t want a power crisis to take place in an election year,” says Joshi.
