India has achieved clean energy targets nine years ahead of schedule Power Minister R.K. Singh said at the Sydney Energy Forum in Sydney, Australia, on July 13. India has installed 162 GW (1 GW is a 1000 MW) of renewable energy capacity which is 41% of the 402 GW of electricity installed.
“We reached this target on November 2021 and what our Prime Minister did was ask us to raise our ambition and so in Glasgow (at the UN COP-21) our Prime Minister committed to installing 500 GW of renewable energy by 2030, which would then be 50% of the installed capacity. Despite having among the lowest per capita emissions in the world, we have invested in this energy transition because our traditions teach us to respect and care for our environment. We are not doing this for economic reasons,” Mr. Singh said. In 2015, India committed to ensuring that 40% of its energy would be from renewable sources by 2030 as part of its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC).
Ministers from the United States, Japan, India, Indonesia, and the Pacific Island nation of Samoa are attending the forum along with leaders of major companies that are committed to low emissions technologies.
The forum, said a statement from the Australian government, will “foster connections between investors, business and government with a focus on innovations in key clean energy technologies such as solar, hydrogen, critical minerals and batteries.”
The energy crisis that has gripped the world has been “sometime in the making” and not only due to the Russia-Ukraine war but because of the “cartelisation in the fossil fuel industry.” He said that renewable energy promised to break these cartels though it was possible that there would be newer such cartel forming in manufacturing and the equipment and the world would have to take steps to ensure that these don’t coalesce.
