India must manage its green energy demand for a successful climate transition

livemint.com:

The energy transition challenge, often presented as a singular issue of greening our energy sources, is far from a one-dimensional problem. As with all public policy situations, the challenge is not amenable to a well-defined problem statement or an elegantly crafted solution. Two recent stories underscored the complexity of the task at hand.

One, published in Bloomberg (biturl.top/mqy2Qr), highlighted the frictions, high costs and inconvenience faced by buyers and sellers of alternative energy, demonstrating the absurdity of forcibly trying to wean the world off fossil fuels. The other, published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (biturl.top/3i6ram), illustrated that even as obstacles are faced in securing our clean energy supply channels, market forces are creating additional sources of significant energy demand, such as data centres for artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto mining, worsening the supply issues and undermining the net-zero goal. The issues laid out demonstrate that the energy transition problem is two-fold.

Securing and integrating green energy supplies are not as straightforward as one would expect. Secondly, even if the supplies are secured, this alone would not enable the world to progress towards net-zero. If the demand is not calibrated by policymakers, the energy supply will forever be left to play catch-up with exponentially higher demand, thus indefinitely delaying the goal of attaining a net-zero world.

This is also responsible for the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption having dropped a measly two percentage points in two decades—from 78.5% in 2004 to 76.5% in 2023 (biturl.top/emAVny). The energy transition is easier said than done. Fossil fuels are integrated into