Davos 2023: India has taken a lead in green energy transition, say stakeholders at WEF

Prime Minister Narendra Modi once said that the sun is always shining somewhere around the globe. For International Solar Alliance’s (ISA) Dr. Ajay Mathur, it captures the core of the issue of the social energy transition. “Solar power is being generated somewhere. How we capture it and use it is the question. We’re now seeing green hydrogen through which we can move the electricity which is then converted into hydrogen. In the last five years we’ve seen a sea change in how we’ve looked at renewable energy, particularly solar energy,” Dr. Ajay Mathur, Director General, ISA said.

He further said there are two key tipping points in India’s green energy transition. “When solar plus storage produces electricity that’s competitive with fossil fuels. Our estimation is that it will happen between 2023-2025. Solar alone is the cheapest form of electricity in 32 geographies of the world plus storage will become cheap soon. Plus it won’t make sense for banks for companies to invest in fossil fuel-based energies. That’s when the change will start happening,” he added. “Between 2010 and 2020, the price of storage fell 90 per cent.”

From a B2C perspective, adds Vaishali Nigam Sinha, Chief Sustainability Office at ReNew Power, India is now going beyond the sun. “It’s really about sustainable existence. This is not being driven by individuals, not by the private sector, investors, regulators, etc. but it’s the magic of everyone coming together and agreeing that sustainable is profitable and sustainable is the way to go and there’s no alternative to it,” she said.

Two years from now, she said, manifestations of sustainable energy like solar, wind, hydrogen, etc. will be conventional and more than 80 per cent of new technologies are yet to be invented for us to be able to meet our net zero goal by 2030. “Our country is really taken the lead as far as this energy transition is concerned.”

According to Tejpreet Singh Chopra, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Bharat Light & Power (BLP), big corporates getting into renewables is good news.

“There’s a significant reduction in the cost of energy for renewables and its huge cost saving for all these companies. For a country with over a billion people, we need  scale that’s our biggest challenge. I think the good news about getting large corporate getting into that sector is that they have the capacity to take risky bets. They’re taking the next step towards hydrogen and new technologies,” he said.