India plans to bring down RE storage costs to edge out fossil fuel

Sumit Maitra

India has decided to promote renewable energy storage facilities so that their costs comes down and effectively out compete fossil fuel, power and new and renewable energy Minister RK Singh recently said at the IEA Clean Energy Transitions Summit.

“We feel that we need to bring the price of storage down and once the price of storage comes down, then pure economics of scale will edge out fossil fuel form of energy,” Singh told the global virtual conference attended by dozens of countries including world’s biggest energy consumers – including China, US and also EU countries.

International Energy Agency’s first Clean Energy Transitions Summit discussed how to bring about a sustainable and resilient recovery from the Covid-19 crisis and achieve a definitive peak in global carbon emissions.

“This Summit proves that international dialogue and collaboration can bring great value. It was an opportunity to inform, support and inspire each other. Now, it is time for all of us to get to work – building back our economies, bringing our citizens back to work, ensuring that 2019 was the definitive peak in emissions and building towards the resilient and sustainable energy systems of the future,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s Executive Director who chaired the meeting.

Edited excerpts of Power Minister RK Singh’s comments

“We are living through extraordinary times as mankind is facing its biggest challenges. We are looking at ahead recovery beyond this challenge although I don’t see clearly as to when we will overcome this challenge until unless a vaccine is successful and made available.

I think it will be futile to look back and think what we could have done differently but what this calamity has done, atleast which everybody will agree, is that it has brought home is that we are living in one world and we and we sink or swim together.

And it is in that perspective that we have to look at environment challenges facing this world and I am thankful to Dr Fatih Birol, International Energy Agency’s Executive Director for bringing up the issue of energy transition.

In our country we have made it very clear that environmental challenges are of paramount importance.

Our country has made a pledge that by 2030, 40 percent of our energy will come from fossil fuel. We are almost close to that at 38.5 percent.

We are going about meeting environmental challenges in two ways: one is energy transition and the other is energy efficiency.

We have highest rate of growth of renewable energy in the world.

We had set a target for ourselves of establishing 1,75,000MW of renewable energy by 2022.

Now if you take the capacity which has been installed and under installation, they are very close at 1,33,000MW.

IEA World Energy Investment 2019 has rated India as the fastest growing energy market.