India recently submitted an updated nationally determined contribution (NDC) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which includes two short-term commitments.

In the Union Budget 2023-24, INR 35,000 crore has been allocated to the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas for achieving energy transition. A major part of this allocation could go into gas exploration and the setting up of gas infrastructure projects, details of which are yet to emerge.

Can natural gas continue to play the role of a transition fuel for India or will this lead to stranded assets in the future? There is no simple answer to this question. Let’s look at some of the key reasons.

Of India’s nearly 62 GW installed solar capacity, about 50 GW is ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) plants. Recent trends show that obtaining land parcels for large solar projects is becoming increasingly difficult. Innovative and viable alternatives are needed to reach the 450 GW renewable energy (RE) target for 2030. Among the buzzwords circulating in the upper echelons of policy and decision-making is ‘agrivoltaics’. The concept aims to optimise land usage by combining agriculture with PV (agriPV).

Green growth refers to a rethinking of traditional development strategies by factoring in how economic growth would impact the environment, and today’s climate crisis prescribes urgent worldwide action on this.

India has inexplicably dithered from making dedicated provisions for climate adaptation in its annual budgets, despite facing the brunt of climate change – it was listed as the seventh most vulnerable in the Climate Risk Index 2021. The upcoming budget for the financial year 2023-24 is an opportunity to demonstrate the policy intent towards ensuring climate-resilience of infrastructure, utilising nature-based solutions, and, most importantly, safeguarding the lives and livelihoods of citizens, especially those dependent on climate-sensitive sectors and living in vulnerable regions.

With India’s commitment to achieving net zero by 2070, one of the milestones is attaining 500 GW capacity from non-fossil fuel-based sources by 2030. India has made significant progress in this regard, with installed renewable energy (RE) capacity reaching 120,900 MW as of 30 December 2022 (solar power: 63,302 MW; wind power: 41,930 MW). However, more than 300 GW needs to be added to achieve the target by 2030.

India is highly dependent on the agriculture sector for its food security, and biodiversity loss leaves crops vulnerable to pests and diseases, thereby lowering yields. It also leads to the increased occurrence of invasive species and reduces the pollinator population. Thus, the interlinkage between food security and biodiversity loss needs to be understood in its entirety.

The country has already made significant progress with installed renewable energy (RE) capacity reaching 114 GW as of 30 June 2022. This includes 41 GW of wind energy and 58 GW of solar energy. However, to get to 500 GW, India still has a long way to go. It needs to install more than 300 GW of RE capacity in the next 8 years. For this, a concerted effort from power sub-sectors (generation, transmission, and distribution) and a detailed analysis of the opportunities and challenges of each of them is required.
In this article, we touch upon transmission and distribution.

A brainchild of Professor Flemming Besenbacher, Professor of Nanophysics at Aarhus University, Denmark, UNLEASH is a global initiative that aims to bring together the next generation of youth from across the globe, providing a platform to share ideas, build networks, and create innovative and scalable solutions to progress towards the SDGs. It has been hosting the Global Innovation Labs annually, with the previous editions being in Denmark (2017), Singapore (2018), and China (2019).

• The climate crisis is embedded in a breakdown of the larger socio-ecological system, wherein solving carbon will not necessarily solve the crises we are in.
• The West has been pushing a carbon-obsessed mitigation narrative.