[Modi’s announcement reflected India’s long-stated ambitions to transition to clean energy. But what he left unsaid was an acknowledgment that, as Indians like Chaudhary grow richer and India’s economy expands in energy-intensive sectors, the country’s electricity demand will rise so sharply that it cannot yet afford to abandon cheap coal power, the source of 70 percent of its electricity, for several decades.]
By Gerry Shih and Brady Dennis
In April, Chaudhary’s dream — a
whitewashed three-bedroom farmhouse — came true. She has views of blazing
sunsets and marble-accented kitchen walls. She has two Japanese refrigerators
and two TVs. She has an air conditioner that she runs all day during summer,
when outside temperatures can soar past 110 degrees.
She also has power cuts, usually
lasting two hours — a near-daily reminder that she is among millions competing
for a limited resource.
“I finally have everything for the
luxury life,” Chaudhary, a 34-year-old bank employee, said with a hearty laugh.
“I just don’t have enough electricity.”
Rising next to fields of mustard
and country roads plied by plodding camel carts, Chaudhary’s new home is a
small part of a vast developmental dilemma facing the world.
At U.N. climate talks on Monday,
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the country will aim for net-zero emissions by 2070 — two decades later
than many advocates had hoped. He also slightly revised some of his existing
targets by pledging that India would install 500 gigawatts of non-fossil energy
by 2030 and meet half of its energy demands from renewable sources by that
date, up from a previously announced goal of 40 percent.
[Updates
from COP26 Glasgow climate conference]
Modi’s announcement reflected
India’s long-stated ambitions to transition to clean energy. But what he left
unsaid was an acknowledgment that, as Indians like Chaudhary grow richer and
India’s economy expands in energy-intensive sectors, the country’s electricity
demand will rise so sharply that it cannot yet afford to abandon cheap coal
power, the source of 70 percent of its electricity, for several decades
How quickly — or how slowly —
India, the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, transitions away
from fossil fuels will help determine whether the world can meet a core goal of
the 2015 Paris agreement to keeping planetary warming “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared
with preindustrial levels.
India’s government says it is doing
more than its fair share to combat climate change and is leaving coal as
quickly as it can. If the rich countries that historically climbed the
development ladder by spewing pollution want India to accelerate its
transition, then they must hand over more financial assistance and technology,
its officials say.
[Negotiators
begin to hammer out plans to pay for climate promises]
“We all know that all the promises
made on climate finance have proved hollow,” Modi said in remarks Monday
as he demanded that developed nations commit $1 trillion to developing
countries. “When we are all increasing our ambition on climate actions, then
the ambition on climate finance cannot remain the same.”
Ulka Kelkar, director of climate at
World Resources Institute India, said Modi’s pledge this week sent a signal
that India will require vast investments not only to deploy solar panels and
wind farms, but also to purchase land, build energy storage, upgrade the
national grid and build transmission lines — all while juggling skyrocketing
demand for power.
“It means no postponing. We’ll need
to put down investments, right now, to reach that 2070 net-zero goal,” Kelkar
said. “It’s not going to be easy.”
Developmental aspirations
Chaudhary’s home state of
Rajasthan, a desert that gets more than 300 days of sunshine a year, embodies
the potential of renewable energy in India. It houses one of the world’s
largest solar parks, generating some of the cheapest solar energy in the world.
But in Chaudhary’s home, her prized appliances, particularly her AC unit,
represent the monumental challenges and costs that remain.
Over the next 20 years, India will
need to add power-generation capacity equal to that of the entire European
Union today, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an
intergovernmental organization. Much of that additional power will feed
factories and offices and electric vehicles. A staggering proportion will go
toward cooling a hot country that’s only getting hotter.
[Can
India chart a low-carbon future? The world might depend on it.]
“We have a developmental aspiration
for our people,” said Rameshwar Prasad Gupta, a senior government official and
a member of India’s climate negotiating team in Glasgow, Scotland. India cannot
afford to abandon coal, Gupta added, because “hundreds of millions of people
would not be able to afford development.”
In 2050, the amount of electricity
India will consume for cooling alone will rise 15-fold from 2018 levels to
1,350 terawatt-hours, or approximately the total India consumed in 2020, the
IEA projects. As the number of ACs in use in India rises from about 30 million
in 2018 to a billion in 2050, about 45 percent of India’s electricity during
peak hours will go to air conditioning
For developing countries like
India, which tend to be in hot and humid climates, an exacerbating factor is
not only how many ACs will be purchased, but when they’re used: in the
evenings, as workers return home, when solar power is at a low ebb.
That means as India continues its
solar rollout, it will need to invest billions in deploying enormous
lithium-ion batteries or acquiring cutting-edge technologies such as hydrogen
fuel to store energy for peak hours. The need for storage effectively triples
the cost of solar power in India, officials and researchers estimate.
“Contrary to popular belief,
renewables plus batteries are nowhere near cost-effective yet for India,” said
Rahul Tongia, an energy expert at the Brookings Institution who developed carbontracker.in, a
real-time tracker of India’s energy production. “During the day when solar
comes down, once wind dies dramatically, you have enormous need for something
else. And that something else is coal.”
An analysis by the Climate Action
Tracker, a group of experts that analyzes national climate pledges, found that
India must phase out coal use from its power sector by 2040 to get on a better
trajectory — a tall order, given that “India still has one of the largest coal
pipelines in the world.”
Nandini Das, an energy research and
policy analyst who reviewed India’s plans for the Berlin-based think tank
Climate Analytics, said India has made significant strides in the shift to
renewables but that its ambitious goals are not yet aggressive enough to help
the world meet its loftiest climate targets. Making bigger and faster changes,
she said, will require help from the outside world in the form of technology
and finance.
India’s government, hamstrung by an
economy devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, will need to make
massive upgrades to the country’s creaking electricity grid to integrate the
amount of renewable energy India will need. It will need expansions of transmission
lines to link sun-beaten western Rajasthan to the hinterland, where coal is
still king. Even if India could begin to decommission coal power plants today,
it would need to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to investors.
Even in Rajasthan, a forerunner in
India’s renewables deployment, energy officials have continued to commission
new coal power projects. Just last month, operations began at a new
660-megawatt unit near the Pakistan border.
Between 2000 and 2020, as India’s
economy liberalized, Rajasthan’s economic output grew nearly 10 times. During
that period, Rajasthan’s annual energy consumption rose fivefold, and it is
expected to double again by 2030, according to state energy officials.
Today, the state’s countryside is
dotted with new factories making cars for Honda and cookies for South Korean
food companies. Life in cities has transformed, too. Aditya Rajwal, an
appliance salesman in Jaipur, said sales of air conditioners at his store have
jumped from about 100 every quarter a few years ago to more than 500 now.
While more Indians have money to
buy air conditioners, they also face more days of punishing heat compared with
a few decades ago, according to meteorological data.
In recent weeks, as India suffered
a nationwide coal shortage, many regions, including
Rajasthan, began to see rolling brownouts. The state leader went on television
to urge residents to turn off appliances. A major utility company announced it
would set an example by banning air conditioners in its offices.
“The crisis exposed the weakness of
renewable energy as a substitute for thermal power in times of need,” said
Subodh Agarwal, the top civil servant in charge of energy in Rajasthan. “Right
when the coal ran out, the wind also died down. Solar and wind are great,
they’re green. But they lose out in consistency.”
Agarwal said Rajasthan, which has
the potential to generate a fifth of all renewable energy in India, was now
mulling a 90-gigawatt solar target for 2030. But it would still use coal for
about a third of its electricity at minimum, he said.
If states like Rajasthan cannot
fully switch to renewable energy, then most of India — the world’s
second-largest coal producer after China — will struggle even more, analysts
say. On the other side of the subcontinent, in India’s eastern hinterlands,
about 4 million jobs rely on the coal industry. Countless more work in sectors
like steel, cement and automobiles rely on coal.
Chandra Bhushan, a prominent
environmentalist and government adviser who heads the consultancy iForest in
New Delhi, said the money required to retrain Indian workers and shut down
mines and power plants over the next 30 years will be at least “an order of
magnitude” greater than in the West.
“Germany paid $60 billion to
decommission its coal power plants, while India has five times more coal-power
capacity. How much is Mr. Biden paying to transition 50,000 coal workers while
Coal India alone employs nine times more people?” he said, referring to India’s
largest state-owned coal mining company. “This is massive, massive enterprise.”
The West, Bhushan added, “is
closing its eyes to the reality of what will be needed.”
In the meantime, the ranks of
Indians with aspirations — like Chaudhary — will grow. The daughter of a dairy
worker, Chaudhary in 2011 bought a parcel of land outside Jaipur for about
$1,300 with her husband, a physical education teacher. For 10 years, she worked
14-hour days so that she could save a fifth of her $532 monthly paycheck for
her future house.
After contractors finished her home
in April, Chaudhary bought a washing machine, TVs, a water heater for hot
showers. At the appliance store, she splurged on an AC made by Eureka Forbes, a
domestic brand.
“It’s not really a status symbol
anymore, but a necessity,” said Chaudhary, who lives with her 63-year-old
mother-in-law. “For six months a year, you feel like you could die.”
On a recent evening, Chaudhary
walked up to her second-floor terrace to show off the view and a guest bedroom.
It wasn’t furnished yet, she said, and made a mental note to herself.
Before next summer, she has to buy
another air conditioner.
Dennis reported from Washington.
Taniya Dutta contributed to this report.
