What is the issue?
Ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all is critical, but this challenge is far from being met.
What is the present scenario?
- The global energy system relies on fossil fuels to provide 80% of total primary energy consumption, and is responsible for about 75% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
- The expansion of an unchanged energy system, at anything close to current levels of CO2 intensity, would likely lead to over 40 C of global warming by the end of the century.
What is the challenge?
- The challenge is to build a clean energy system that can simultaneously expand access to modern energy services on an affordable basis and tackle the environmental challenges.
- So, a global energy system capable of delivering 80 GJ per capita across the world but emitting no more than 20 GT of CO2 by 2040 is needed.
- Such a transition in the energy system will depend on simultaneously achieving four crucial transitions:
- decarbonisation of power combined with extended electrification;
- decarbonisation of activities which cannot be easily electrified;
- acceleration in the pace of energy productivity improvement; and
- optimisation of fossil fuel use within overall carbon budget constraints.
What are the scenarios?
- Global research shows that the cost of firm renewable electricity (renewable electricity + battery) is on a steady decline and would stabilise at around $70 per MWh, or about Rs 5 per kWh.
- If this price goal is achieved, or nearly achieved, by 2023-24, and if appropriate infrastructure to absorb large amounts of renewable energy is in place, then all new capacity addition could be based on RE.
- On the other hand, if this price goal is not achieved, the growth in demand would be largely met by new coal capacity additions, with a limited number of new renewables.
- In this low renewables scenario, an additional 115 Mw of coal capacity would come online between 2026 and 2030.
What could be done?
- The RE target can only be realised by focusing on multiple fronts of the RE ecosystem such as indigenous manufacturing, project management, and grid integration.
- Growth in indigenous manufacturing of RE components can coincide with the growth in RE installations.
- The focus should be on increasing the competitiveness of Indian manufacturers on a par with international players.
- This can be done via incentivising development of new production technology which can reduce cost, lowering cost of finance, long tenured loans for RE production units, and higher allocation for R&D on RE technologies, along with industry-wide collaboration for reducing time of commercialisation.
- The Indian grid must adapt to the new challenges of high installed base of variable RE sources.
- The focus should be on developing more efficient evacuation infrastructure, forecasting infrastructure of RE, developing balancing capability and introducing market mechanisms.
Source: Business Standard
