Environment: A report by Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) says renewables in electricity must increase 55-fold if India is to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The country will need to generate at least 83 percent of its electricity from (non-hydro power) renewable energy sources.
To achieve this target, the share of electricity in India’s industrial energy use must rise three-fold, from 20.3 percent in 2018 to 70 percent in 2050, the study—Peaking and Net-Zero for India’s Energy Sector CO2 Emissions: An Analytical Exposition—revealed.
Policymakers will also need to identify manufacturing sectors where electricity could replace fossil fuels. Reducing the cost of electricity to make it competitive would be equally critical, Vaibhav Chaturvedi, Fellow at CEEW, and author of the study said.
In addition, India will need to closely examine the increasing cost of household electricity, increasing railway passenger fares, fiscal challenges for coal-dependent states, job losses for over half a million coal mining workers, and the shifting geopolitics around energy trade and the energy transition before announcing its net-zero targets according to Arunabha Ghosh, CEO, CEEW.
Advanced economies, including China, Japan, the UK, and the US, would have longer periods of transition—at least 30-40 years, since they peaked emissions at much higher levels of development, and slower rates of growth. “India would need to undergo a double transition, through faster electrification of sectors and an increasing share of renewables in power generation, if it were to announce an ambitious net-zero target”, added Chaturvedi.
The study also found that if India were to peak in 2030 and reach net-zero in 2060 like China, its cumulative carbon emissions from 2021 to 2100 would be 80 GtCO2. For the same period, China and the US’ cumulative carbon emissions, even after incorporating their net-zero ambition, would be 349 GtCO2 and 104 GtCO2, respectively.
According to the World Bank, India’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions stood at 1.82 tCO2 in 2016, much lower than the global average of 4.55 tCO2.
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