India: How can the country meet its ambitious renewable energy growth targets?
A major control reserve study for the southern region of India aims to quantify the requirements that are needed to balance the energy supply from renewable energy sources.
India is one of the largest countries in the world and home to more than a billion people. The country’s energy needs mirror this vast scale, but India cannot continue to rely fossil-fuels, such as its large coal-reserves. This is because India has made strong commitments under the UN Paris Climate Agreement. To meet these commitments, in 2016, the country announced one of the world’s largest renewable energy expansion programme, with the aim of installing 175 GW of green power by 2022.
In 2019 this target was increased at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi who announced that he was expanding the renewable energy target to 450 GW by 2030. To put this into context, that’s around 60 per cent of India’s installed electricity generation capacity coming from clean sources by 2030.
India is already one of the world’s leading clean-energy producers, with an installed renewables capacity of 83 GW, plus 31 GW under development and a further 35 GW out for tender, according to the World Economic Forum.
But these ambitious targets would require innovative solutions to integrate the significantly higher proportion of variable renewable sources. One such effort which serves as a prime example of the Indian government’s commitment putting the country at the forefront of the global energy transition, is a major control reserve study for the southern region of India by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), supported by DNV.
It is the first control reserve study to be conducted in this part of the world and aims to quantify the control reserve requirements that are needed to balance the energy supply from wind and solar to meet the 2022 targets for the region.
Not surprisingly, the growing renewables targets have coincided with a sharp increase in investment from both domestic and foreign sources. In 2019, India was ranked the fourth most attractive renewable energy market in the world, further reinforcing its status as a key market for green acceleration. DNV’s latest report, Investing in the Asia Pacific region gives a breakdown of the investment landscape and opportunities in detail. But one thing is clear, helping India to reach its ambitious targets are varied and extensive as the country transforms into a hotspot for clean energy expansion.
2020/08/24 5:00:00