China surges ahead of India on energy generation and consumption

As the world eagerly awaits India’s climate action, there is absolute clarity that the country’s intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) will not be similar to that of China.

Updated on: Sep 4, 2015, 24:39:52 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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As the world eagerly awaits India’s climate action, there is absolute clarity that the country’s intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) will not be similar to that of China.

Energy ministries highlighted why coal-based thermal power plants are necessary for India to continue growing. (HT File Photo)

The inter-governmental consultations on framing the INDCs have shown that India is nowhere close to China on energy generation and consumption — drivers for deciding a nation’s climate action.

China’s installed energy capacity is five times that of India; every household in China has access to electricity unlike 56% households in India and just a quarter of households in China use biomass for cooking as compared to 85% of rural homes in India.

When it comes to emissions, more than one-fourth of global emissions were by China as compared to just 6% for India in 2014. India’s per capita emissions are one-third of China’s.

These are some facts that energy ministries — power, coal and new and renewable energy (RE) — conveyed to the environment ministry during consultation for firming up India’s INDCs. They have also highlighted why coal-based thermal power plants were necessary for India to continue high economic growth trajectory in the next 15 years or so.

Documents accessed by HT show these ministries have strongly voiced their opposition towards any attempt to match China on INDCs as it could have implications on the country’s economic growth.

Former Planning Commission member Kirit Parikh too has strongly advocated against pushing renewable beyond a certain threshold to match China’s ambitious RE goal.

“RE has its limitations and it cannot fuel (economic) growth like other forms of fossil fuels. A RE-dependent economy could mean two percentage point fall in GDP growth as compared to business-as-usual scenario,” he said.

China has committed to generate 20% of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2030, reduce carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 60-65 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels and limit power generation from thermal power plants.

Something similar could be disastrous for India, which is expected to submit its INDCs in September to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) after getting Cabinet’s nod.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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