India Could Be A Global Change Agent For Renewable Energy: US

India which has set an ambitious target of generating 175 gigawatts of clean energy, can be an agent of change for the world in the renewable sector, US has said.

"India could really be a change agent for the rest of the world in the renewable energy sector if they get it right. So we have a vested interest in helping them get that right," said Melanie Nakagawa, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Transformation in US.

And as India embarks on the project which is likely to cost USD 1 trillion to build its infrastructure from road to ports, she said it is a great opportunity for the world, "to showcase" India as a country that gets the sustainability future right.

"I think there's a story to be written there as they get closer to it but it's going to be tough. I mean it's going to take not just the political will, but it's going to take the reforms and the policies needed to actually see this possible future happen," she said.

Noting that Indian government needs USD 100 billion in investment including USD 70 billion of debt financing to meet their 175 gigawatt target by 2022, the US official said those numbers can't be met with public finance alone. And necessary reforms are needed to attract private investment.

"India's commitments on the 175 gigawatt renewable energy target by 2022, their commitments on solar, their commitments also in the finance infrastructure space, this all makes it a really impressive political will, signal and political will," Ms Nakagawa said.

India's target of generating 175 gigawatt of power by 2022 from renewable sources includes 100 GW from solar, 60 GW from wind, 10 GW from biomass and 5 GW from small hydroelectric project.

India and the US are working closely together in this field. The US-India Clean Energy Finance Task Force which was established in September 2015 has had three meetings so far.

This is a government-to-government task force focused on clean energy investment and finance. It's complimented by a private sector led task force called a Clean Energy Finance Forum, the which is led by Uday Kemkha and SunEdison.

Original Post: PTI

State coal mining firm plans 1GW of solar in India

State-owned coal mining company Coal India Limited (CIL) plans to develop 1GW of solar power projects across India in a bid to reduce its carbon footprint.

Nagendra Kumar, technical director of CIL, told PV Tech that the company has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) to carry out the solar projects. SECI was recently renamed Renewable Energy Corporation of India (RECI) as it became a commercial entity.

Kumar said: “We are trying to locate new states, but at the first stage we are looking at Madhya Pradesh.”

CIL plans to complete at least one 250MW project within one year in Madhya Pradesh. Kumar added that to complete 1GW of installations there is a problem with land acquisition currently. Land in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa and Chhattisgarh were cited as potential options.

Kumar said the entrance into the solar market is “one step” the company is taking to reduce its carbon footprint.

Yesterday multinational conglomerate Aditya Birla Group also announced its partnership with private equity investor Abraaj Group to develop utility-scale solar power plants in India. The new renewable energy platform, Aditya Birla Renewables Limited, plans to bid for projects tendered in both state and national auctions in India. For example, there are state auctions coming up in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh.

Original Post :Tom Kenning

West Polluted World' for 150 Years, and India Says It Won't Pay

Original Post: Anindya Upadhyay

“You made the mess -- you clean it up” may well be India’s attitude at the coming international climate-change talks in Paris.

“It’s the West which has polluted the world for the last 150 years with cheap energy,” Indian Power Minister Piyush Goyal said in an interview. “I can’t tell the people of India that we’ll burden you with high costs because the West has polluted the world, now India will pay for it. Not acceptable to us.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has sent mixed signals about its stance toward climate change, adopting aggressive targets for adopting renewable energy while at the same time pointing the finger of blame at richer nations for causing global warming.

Indian officials coordinating climate policy have met with their U.S. and Chinese counterparts in recent weeks to discuss the December talks in Paris, and India has said it will make a pledge in the near future for how it will act under the deal that is due to emerge. It isn’t clear whether India will commit to a date to start rolling backgreenhouse gas emissions, and U.S. officials have said they don’t expect such a pledge from India this year.

“India doesn’t take responsibility for the problems that the world is facing because ofthermal coal,” Goyal said in the interview in New Delhi Sept. 8. “Our pollution out of carbon emissions is still very, very low compared to the world.”

PRECISION SCREENS FOR SOLAR CELL PRINTING

Fourth-Largest Emitter

India is the fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind China, the U.S. and the European Union. India emitted about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2014, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. That is about one quarter the amount of China and one third the amount of the U.S.

India said in August that its national proposal to the Paris talks will cover mitigation, adaptation, finance and technology. So far, almost 50 countries constituting more than half the world’s emissions have submitted their plans -- formally known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs.

The government of India is likely to present its proposals by Sept. 27, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change said Sept. 15 in Brussels.

India’s climate change plan may see a bigger renewable target for 2030 than the current goal of 175-gigawatt capacity to be built over the next seven years, Goyal said. The country needs cheap power to aid development, he said.

He will add large hydro-power projects to expand the renewable target, he said.

Hydropower, LEDs

"I want to reignite the interest in hydro-electric investments," he said. India intends to almost quintuple its clean energy installations to 175 gigawatts by 2022 with wind, solar, biomass and small hydro projects.

India allowed development of offshore wind projects up to 200 nautical miles into the surrounding seas earlier this month to help achieve its climate-change goals.

As part of the government’s energy-efficiency program, Goyal aims to save 100 billion kilowatt-hour units of power consumption annually by eliminating less efficient incandescent and CFL bulbs over the next three years.

“Our target is to do 770 million LED bulbs in the country, eliminating the CFLs and the incandescents in three years," he said.

Worse news for Australia as India taps solar, Beijing bans coal

Original Post:  By Sophie Vorrath 

As Australia’s federal government commits to a future digging up, burning and most of all exporting the nation’s vast coal resource, two of the countries upon which this shaky economic plan is most dependent – India and China – look to be closing the door on the heavy polluting fossil fuel.

In Delhi last week, the Indian government committed to a plan to provide low-cost loans and grants to set up some of the world’s largest solar PV parks across the country, each of them comprising as much as 20 gigawatts of capacity, about 10 times what India has built to date.

The parks will host large plants ranging between 500 megawatts to 1,000MW that will be connected to the grid. State utilities will be expected to purchase at least 20 per cent of the power generated at the parks, leaving project owners free to export the remainder of electricity to consumers elsewhere in the country.

“We’re preparing a scheme for solar parks and it will be out after cabinet approval in about one month,” said Tarun Kapoor, joint-secretary at the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, speaking at the EQ solar Summit on Friday.

India’s plans are to use scale to drive down solar costs and produce power from at least four of these so-called ultra-mega projects at a maximum of 5,500 rupees a megawatt-hour – that is about 32 per cent below the global average for solar, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and well below the average for coal-fired power generation. The land used for the projects will also be subsidised by the government to keep project costs low.

Separately, India also plans to auction 1,500MW of PV capacity in its biggest tender yet, the final guidelines of which will be issued this month. The first 750MW are expected to be awarded in bidding by the end of September, according to the state-run power trader overseeing the process, NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam Ltd.

As Tim Buckley wrote on RenewEconomy in May, in the context of waning coal consumption in China, India has become increasingly critical to the stability or continued growth of the seaborne coal market.

Add to this India’s five-year solar lighting goal – a pledge from the newly elected Indian PM, Narendra Modi, that every home in the power-starved nation would be able to run at least one light bulb by 2019, powered by solar – and you have what looks like a much diminished future coal equation for Australia.

China, meanwhile, is moving ahead on plans to address its pollution problem by phasing out coal, with the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau announcing on Monday that the districts of Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chaoyang, Haidian, Fengtai and Shijingshan would stop using coal and its related products, and close coal-fired power plants and other coal facilities, by 2020.

According to official Chinese government statistics, coal use accounted for 25.4 per cent of the capital’s energy consumption in 2012 – a figure that is expected to shrink to less than 10 per cent by 2017.

As we have noted before on RenewEconomy, China’s plans to slash its already declining coal use poses a major – but certainly not unheralded – problem for Australia’s coal industry.

According to data from Newcastle’s Port Waratah Coal Services, China has accounted for just over 25 per cent of coal through the Port of Newcastle, the world’s biggest coal export hub in 2014.

On top of this, the price for thermal coal has plunged more than 10 per cent in the last two months – due largely to major importing nations like India making it clear that renewable energy is offering a competitive energy alternative.

Currently, thermal coal is sold for less than $70 on the spot market, well below the mark for Australian producers to make money, let alone the cost of production and the level to get the finance for the massive new projects Prime Minister Tony Abbott is hoping to encourage – or those projects already in the pipeline, like the multi-billion dollar development of what would be one of the world’s biggest coalmines, in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, largely earmarked for export to India.

But, as Buckley noted, problems for Indian coal electricity generators, compounded by a range of other challenges, “mitigate against the chances that India policy makers will favour large-scale centralised coal fired power generation in the future.”

As for China, Greg McKenna says it well on Business Insider today: “there is some hope that a base is being formed and that this news is already baked into the cake but as China moves away from coal use and invests in clean energy it seems any chance of a boom as China grows may prove ephemeral.”

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