India has ambitious renewable energy targets. Recent efforts by the government have given a boost to demand-side efforts in increasing renewable energy use in the country’s energy mix. However, decarbonization goals can be met quicker with a co-existence of demand and supply-side efforts.
India’s battle against climate change needs both supply and demand-side solutions to converge as much as possible. A real call for action is for the electricity regulators to insist on energy efficiency, rooftop solar, embedded storage solutions, and demand-response investments on the customer-side of the meter through a benign regulated environment.
India has a renewable energy (RE) target of 175 GW by 2022 and 450 GW by 2030. There is a substantial push offered through a variety of procurement support to utility-scale and rooftop photovoltaic (PV) solutions to increase RE uptake. Yet the RE generators have been reporting over 5 percent curtailment in some places.
Reasons for RE curtailment include both technical constraints related to backing down of fossil sources as well as economic decisions should some fossil assets be lower in the merit order of dispatch, which represents scheduling power flow from sources that the cheapest first moving up the ladder towards high variable cost power. Offtake of the RE sources by users is an essential ingredient for attracting additional investments in the sector to ensure global investors do not ditch Indian renewables.
Thus, there needs to be a specific emphasis on absorbing additional renewables in the electricity grid system for India to decarbonize quickly.
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