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Renewables Rich Rajasthan can Lead India’s Energy Transition: IEEFA
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s India looks to expand its renewable energy capacity, a new report from IEEFA finds that Rajasthan can play a key leadership role in India’s transition to a low-cost, lowemission, profitable electricity system. The state’s installed renewable energy capacity reached 9.6 gigawatts (GW) at the
end of fiscal year (FY) 2019/20. It also added more solar power capacity (1.7 GW) in FY 2019/20 than any other Indian state, ahead of Karnataka (1.4 GW), the state with the highest installed solar capacity, and Tamil Nadu (1.3 GW). “Rajasthan has a bright future as a renewable energy leader in India,” said the
report’s author Kashish Shah, Research Analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). “But its power distribution companies (Discoms) are among the worst performing in India.” Expensive coal-fired capacity tariffs coupled with huge aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses led to the Rajasthan discoms booking a loss of Rs 6,355 crore in FY2019/20 after accounting for state government subsidies. “A shift to cheaper renewable capacity could help alleviate the Discoms’ financial liquidity and cash flow issues,” said Shah. The state has high solar radiation and wind speeds and an abundance of barren land that will make it suitable for utilityscale solar parks. A testament of which is that it is already home to the world’s largest solar park – the 2.25 GW Bhadla Solar Park, located in Jodhpur district. “These factors make Rajasthan an attractive destination for domestic and foreign investors looking for opportunities in renewable energy, electricity grid infrastructure and associated manufacturing,” said Shah.
The World can and Must Achieve Net-Zero Emissions by 2050: Report
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new report by the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) argues in its new report that the world can and must achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century and that “zero must mean zero” with no permanent reliance on negative emissions to balance continued energy and industrial emissions. It also lays out the steps needed in the next decade to achieve that objective. In the report ‘Making Mission Possible – Delivering A Net-Zero Economy’, the ETC shows that clean electrification must be the primary route to decarbonisation: it highlights that dramatic falls in the cost of renewable energy make this
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easily affordable and argues that all growth in electricity supply should now come from zero-carbon sources with no need to build any new coal-fired power capacity to support economic growth and rising living standards. The report demonstrates that it is technically and economically possible to have a carbon-free economy by around mid-century at a total cost of less than 0.5% of global GDP by taking three overarching steps: Using less energy while improving living standards in developing economies, by
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achieving dramatic improvements in energy efficiency and shifting to a circular economy;
Scaling up clean energy provision by building massive generation capacities of cheap clean power, at a pace five to six times higher than today, as well as expanding other zero-carbon energy sources such as hydrogen; Using clean energy across all sectors of the economy by electrifying many applications in buildings, transport and industry, and deploying new technologies and processes using hydrogen, sustainable biomass or carbon capture in sectors that cannot be electrified, like heavy industry or long-distance shipping and aviation.
