India Needs To Have More Ambitious Renewable Goals

India's electricity demand is soaring, driven by economic growth and upcoming drivers for demand, including from cooling, industry, green hydrogen, and mobility (electric vehicles).

- Rohit Vijay

The government's plan to install 500 GW of non-fossil capacity by 2030 is ambitious, but is this "enough"?

Let's consider only meeting rising demand with new renewable energy (RE, or even non-fossil, which adds new hydro and nuclear supply)—if we don't have enough, then we need more fossil fuel output, primarily coal. As we dig deeper through a new CSEP study, we find that not only is the ambition insufficient to meet incremental demand through 2030 on average, but the situation is even more challenging for these RE targets when we consider their time-of-day output, variability and uncertainty, and grid stability.

Balancing the electricity grid is one of the most complex tasks mankind has achieved, primarily because it relies on real-time balancing demand and supply (net of system losses). The old calculation started with demand and then built out enough capacity to meet said demand at all times, along with a predictable buffer. But with the rise of wind and solar, mainstays of India's decarbonisation ambitions, even supply is highly variable.

If we start with the energy requirements (kilowatt-hours, or kWh), no one knows precisely how much output a one MW wind turbine or solar plant will give, let alone when it will do so. We only know solar mostly follows a bell curve of output, and wind is relatively seasonal. Even these depend on a range of variables we study, including location and the use of rooftop solar. We also have enormous uncertainty on the shape of the demand curve. While mid-day demand is rising, which is good for aligning with solar supply, we still have huge demand growth in the evening, and this will only worsen with more air conditioning loads.