Climate and Us | India's domestic goal of 450 GW RE capacity by 2030 is crucial
India must act on its domestic renewable energy and climate goals for this will also help in delivering on its updated NDC. It will also help maintain people’s trust in the Centre’s seriousness when it comes to clean energy
Following the Union Cabinet’s approval last week of India’s nationally determined contribution (NDC) to be submitted to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), several experts have pointed out that India has laid down climate goals that it will easily achieve under current policies. Simply put, the NDC goals are not very ambitious.
The world is heading to a warming of 2.4 degree C with 2030 targets and even higher, 2.7 degree C, with current policies. (Uday Deolekar)
For example, India has promised to reduce the emissions intensity of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 45% by 2030, from the 2005 level, and achieve about 50% cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030, as promised by Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi in the Glasgow climate conference late last year. But the NDC will not include two other goals that PM Modi had announced in Glasgow — that India’s non-fossil energy capacity would reach 500 GW by 2030 and that India will reduce its total projected carbon emissions by one billion tonnes by 2030.
India, however, already has a domestic goal of achieving a renewable energy capacity of 450 GW by 2030. Last year, at the UN General Assembly, PM Modi said India will increase its renewable energy installed capacity to 450 GW by 2030 and develop a national hydrogen energy mission to scale up annual green hydrogen production to 1 MT by 2030. More than one energy expert has shared a screen grab from a 2020 Central Electricity Authority (CEA) report with me which projected that in 2030 solar and wind energy alone will make up for 51% of total installed energy capacity.
Why then does the NDC not mention the 450 GW renewable energy target?
Under present geopolitical circumstances, India prefers to keep the 450 GW renewable energy capacity a domestic goal. What India pledges to the UNFCCC also depends on progress in climate action globally and the delivery of climate finance. Perhaps rightly so. Developed countries with the largest share of historical responsibility for the climate crisis have not yet delivered on their promises on climate finance and technology transfer. Climate journalists from developing countries almost certainly know there will be little progress on climate action at COP 27 to be held at Sharm El Sheikh later this year. The red lines will be over non-delivery of climate finance and deciding on a new, larger climate finance goal.
In 2009, at COP15 in Copenhagen, developed country parties committed to a goal of mobilising jointly $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. They had specified that the finance would come from a wide range of sources — public and private, bilateral, and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance.
But a climate finance delivery plan co-led by the minister of environment and climate change, Canada, Jonathan Wilkinson and the state secretary, federal ministry for the environment, Germany, Jochen Flasbarth released days ahead of COP26 last year said developed countries will likely be able to mobilise $100 billion only in 2023, with a delay of three years compared to what was promised.
According to the UNFCCC’s standing committee on finance, developing countries need almost $6 trillion up to 2030 to implement their NDCs under the Paris Agreement. Under such circumstances, parties are announcing their NDCs carefully. Most developed countries have announced net-zero emissions goal for mid-century; some of them have put them down in long-term strategy documents submitted to UNFCCC. India is also drafting its long-term strategy articulating its net zero emissions goal for 2070. But these long-term strategies are inconsequential if ambitions, collectively, are not raised for the immediate future until say 2030.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has flagged the wide gap between what countries have committed so far through their NDCs and the action needed to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees C. The amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the world needs to at most peak by 2025 followed by a 43% reduction over the next 10 years to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the year 2100, the IPCC said in its Working Group III report on Mitigation of Climate Change. It warned that policies implemented till the end of 2020 will add more emissions and lead to a rise of 3.2°C by the end of the century. Average annual GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions in the past decade were higher than any previous decade: Emissions between 2010-19 were around 12% and 54% higher than in 2010 and 1990 so meeting the 1.5-degree goal is unlikely, it said.
Despite the clear warning on the danger of exceeding 1.5 degrees C warming from the IPCC, progress on new, more ambitious 2030 climate targets and participation in sectoral initiatives have stalled since COP26 in Glasgow, an analysis by Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific analysis that tracks government climate action, said last month.
The world is heading to a warming of 2.4 degrees C with 2030 targets and even higher, 2.7 degrees C, with current policies, it found. This is one of the reasons why it was agreed in the Glasgow Pact to update national 2030 climate targets in 2022. But no developed country has updated its targets again as yet. Another analysis by CAT said governments have largely failed to seize their chance to rearrange their energy supplies away from fossil fuels. This is mainly due to the security crisis in Ukraine which led to a spike in oil and gas prices and complete disruption of energy markets. “We are witnessing a global “gold rush” for new fossil gas production, pipelines and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities. This risks locking us into another high-carbon decade and keeping the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit out of reach,” CAT said in its analysis in June.
Under such circumstances, India must act on its domestic renewable energy and climate goals very seriously which will also help deliver on the updated NDC. It will also help maintain people’s trust in the Centre’s seriousness when it comes to clean energy and the climate crisis. A cautious approach in the global climate negotiations is understandable. India will have to maintain pressure on developed countries to raise ambition for 2030 goals, and mobilise developing countries in demanding delivery of climate finance and access to clean energy technologies from the developed world at Sharm El Sheikh.
From the climate crisis to air pollution, from questions of the development-environment tradeoffs to India’s voice in international negotiations on the environment, HT’s Jayashree Nandi brings her deep domain knowledge in a weekly column
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