Powering Indias Renewables Sector

ndia's first-ever renewable energy summit-RE-Invest 2015-has secured 200 billion worth of investment commitments from foreign firms such as SunEdison and First Solar and Indian companies such as Suzlon, Reliance Power and NTPC. If those commitments are realised, they will be sufficient to meet ambitious targets set by the NDA government to ramp up solar energy generation capacity to 100,000 MW and wind energy to 60,000 MW by 2022. That would represent a 33-fold rise in solar and wind generation from today's levels and might seem steep. But it responds to structural compulsions of India's energy policy.

If there is one thing that marks out PM Narendra Modi's Make-in-India strategy, it is a shift towards the East Asian model of growth. For a long time, there was glib talk of India leap-frogging stages and jumping straight into a post-industrial economy where the vast majority of jobs are in the services sector. This, however, takes no account of the fact that in the next 5 years, the country's working age population (15-59 years) will rise from 804 million to 856 million. This requires 10 million new jobs every year to keep up with demographic expansion.

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Reference: altenergyprograms.blogspot.com