India Doubles Its Clean Energy Pledge And Turns To The Harder Problem Of Storage

India will add another 500 gigawatts of non-fossil power capacity over the next ten to eleven years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Monday, roughly doubling a target the country is already within reach of meeting, and putting the investment opportunity in the sector at 220 billion dollars by the end of the decade.

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Speaking at the inauguration of the Bharat Renewable Energy Summit and Expo in New Delhi, Modi said India had reached nearly 300 gigawatts of its existing commitment of 500 gigawatts of non-fossil capacity by 2030, made at the Glasgow climate conference in 2021. He said the country had met a separate pledge, to draw half its installed power capacity from non-fossil sources, in 2025, five years ahead of schedule. “This target is somewhat difficult, but I have faith in the capability of my country,” he said of the new goal.

India now ranks among the three largest producers of solar and renewable power in the world. But installed capacity measures what a country can generate, not what it does, and the distinction is where the next decade will be decided. Non-fossil sources accounted for roughly 55 per cent of India’s 555 gigawatts of installed capacity by August, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Over the three months to September, coal and lignite still supplied about 66 per cent of the electricity actually generated. Renewables other than large hydro supplied 19 per cent. Solar and wind plants produce at around a fifth of their rated capacity across a year; coal plants run at more than three times that.

That gap explains the bulk of Modi’s address, which dwelt less on building capacity than on storing and moving the power it produces. He asked startups, engineering institutes and entrepreneurs to design solar systems that work around the clock and in every season, and called for indigenous storage hardware and new battery capacity, describing the shortfall as an opening for young Indians. “The solutions that you prepare in India will come in handy for numerous countries of the world,” he said.

On distribution, he said India had recently set an investment target of about 2 trillion rupees to extend its green energy corridors, the dedicated transmission lines and substations that carry power from the windy and sun-rich states to those with less of either. He credited the earlier integration of five regional grids into a single network running at one frequency.

Modi framed the whole effort as a response to the year’s energy shocks, with the West Asia crisis still unresolved. He said the disruptions had shown that energy security and economic security were the same question, and that countries dependent on fossil fuels would face repeated shocks because reserves are finite and held in few places. India, which imports the large majority of the crude oil it consumes, would have faced a sharper crisis without a decade of clean energy investment, he said.

He offered the country’s household solar programme as an exportable model, particularly for the Global South. Launched in February 2024 with a target of a million rooftops, it has signed up more than 6.5 million homes in about two years, at a rate he put at 100,000 every six days. One study cited in his address found electricity bills for those households had fallen by around 76 per cent; some pay nothing and some sell surplus power back to the grid.

More than 44,000 government buildings have been connected to solar, saving close to 7 billion rupees a year, and over three million farmers have been given solar irrigation under a separate scheme, saving each of them about 100,000 rupees annually. A newer programme puts panels on reservoirs and ponds to avoid buying land. Modi said farmers should now go beyond pumps and plant panels on unused ground and along field boundaries, so that the food provider becomes an energy provider.

Manufacturing has followed the demand. India’s solar module capacity has risen from about 2 gigawatts a decade ago to more than 200 gigawatts, with cell capacity near 40 gigawatts, after years in which even minor components were imported.

Modi said the sector had drawn more than 164 billion dollars over the past decade, including 63 billion in the two years since the last investment summit. He also pointed to a proposed 200-million-dollar solar facility for Africa. The summit is being held alongside the ninth assembly of the International Solar Alliance, which India hosts, and a conference on green hydrogen, where India is targeting five million tonnes of annual production by 2030.