With depleting resources of energy, India is working towards ways to produce renewable energy. Prime minister, Manmohan Singh said in a recent statement that India plans to double its renewable energy capacity to 55,000 MW by 2017 as part of efforts to increase efficiency of its energy use. He added, “It is proposed to double the renewable energy capacity in our country from 25000 MW in 2012 to 55000 MW by the year 2017.” He was inaugurating the Fourth Clean Energy Ministerial conference in New Delhi.
PM mentioned that as part of this plan, we will be making use of non-conventional energy sources like solar, wind power and energy from biomass. Evolving a low carbon strategy will also be included in India’s 12th Five Year Plan.
“We have set ourselves a national target of increasing the efficiency of energy use to bring about a 20 to 25 per cent reduction in the energy intensity of our GDP by 2020,” PM said.
PM clearly said that relying on these new energy sources turns out to be more expensive than conventional source of energy but there are ways to resolve that. “The cost of solar energy for example has nearly halved over the last two years, though it remains higher than the cost of fossil fuel based electricity. If the cost imposed by carbon emissions is taken into account, then solar energy is more cost effective, but it is still more expensive,” he said.
Considering the fall in prices, PM said India has kickstarted a Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission to develop 22,000 MW of solar capacity by the 2022, which will cover both solar photovoltaic and solar thermal. “The cost differential is being covered by different forms of subsidy and cross subsidy,” he said.
