On today's special, we turn our attention to India’s clean energy transition - the current landscape and the road ahead. The government has stated its intent to reduce the country's emission intensity as well as significantly increase installed power capacity from renewable energy sources by the end of this decade.

The government’s near-term targets are also ambitious. For instance, the promise to provide 24x7 power to all households by 2022 and installation of 175 gigawatts of new renewable energy with a plan to expand it to 450 giga watts (GW) by 2030.

In its latest report on self-reliance for renewable energy manufacturing, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) attempted to provide a roadmap for India to emerge as a global manufacturing hub for renewable energy.

Even as the report commends attractive manufacturing schemes like the domestic content requirement, phased local manufacturing plan for solar and production linked incentives for battery manufacturing, some bottlenecks remain. Prominently, the alignment of the Centre’s policies with those of states and the perpetual problem of discoms.

To discuss further CNBC-TV18 spoke with Ramesh Nair, Member, CII National Council for Renewable Energy as well as CEO of Adani Solar, and Sameer Gupta, Chairman of the CII National Committee on Renewable Energy Manufacturing and Chairman Of Jakson India.

Tulsi Tanti, Chairman of CII Renewable Energy Council and chairman of Suzlon Group, Jayadev Galla, Vice-Chairman and managing director of Amararaja Batteries and Praveer Sinha, Co-Chairman, CII National Committee on power and the CEO and MD of Tata Power also joined the discussion.

Tata Power’s Sinha said India has a very ambitious plan for renewable energy that can play an important role in the future for capacity additions and meeting the power requirement.

However, he suggested that structural change is required to create demand. “So, it is important how you create enough consumption of renewable energy,” he said.

According to Sinha, the challenge before the nation is that distribution reforms have still not happened. He pressed for these structural changes and called for a big-ticket change of reform because “going forward more capacity has to be added, there has to be a way in which these discoms are in position to purchase power and pay for it.”

For the entire discussion, watch the accompanying video.

(Edited by : Kanishka Sarkar)

First Published:Jul 14, 2021 6:59 PM IST