Business innovations from India can fuel growth of Global Biofuel Alliance, says renewable energy agency’s deputy director general
Biofuel Alliance (GBA) can aim for success, Gauri Singh, Deputy Director General, International Renewable Energy Agency, said India has a big role to play in the important initiative.
“Innovation in business models coming from India will have a huge impact on how many other countries in the developing world can take up this entire initiative and move forward with it,” she said on November 3 while speaking at an event co-hosted by the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in the capital. The event was held from November 1-3.
Illustrating with an example, Singh said that an innovative approach is needed to see how farmers can bring the biomass to “mandis” in order to be better organised. “These are the takeaways that have meaning for the Global South because a lot of economies are in a similar position.”
Elaborating further, Singh said that achieving net zero emissions by 2050 implies that 15-16% of energy consumption globally will come from modern biomass.
“Today it is at 11% but the majority of it is via traditional biomass. So that shift will happen within the biomass sector itself.
India is an agrarian society and the biomass supply chains can become more organised — it will have a huge impact on the economy of the country,” she stated.
Singh added that biomass being used now contributes to just under 60x joules of energy and is expected to up to 90x joules by 2030 and eventually reach 130x joules by 2050. “That’s a huge potential that one can see for biofuel — if the cost of technology comes down and we are able to move with waste stock like rice which has a lot of silica and is also difficult to process.
