The interim budget features hits and misses on climate pathways

livemint.com:

India’s interim budget for the year 2024-25 was presented earlier this month with an accompanying analysis of impacts on various sectors. As has been pointed out by many over the last week, several positive indications have been provided for sectors enabling low-carbon pathways for the country.

Among these, the major winners seem to be grid-connected solar power, with a near doubling of budget allocation, rooftop solar panels for 100 million houses, viability gap funding for 1 gigawatt (GW) of offshore wind power, coal gasification and liquefaction of 100 tonnes capacity, and a sixfold increase in outlay for the national Green Hydrogen Mission. Prima facie, all these initiatives need to be lauded as they together seek to address the key challenges of energy access for the poor and vulnerable as well as diversity and security of supply, while leveraging domestic resource endowments.

However, it is also critically important to be cognizant of the potential pitfalls of each low-carbon initiative, so as to win with every experiment in our quest to transform energy-usage towards India’s 2070 net-zero goal. The advantages of offshore wind energy are well recognized: It has higher capacity utilization factors, lower variability and lower costs.

However, a review of global experiences in the last year or two should also reveal the challenges of converting potential to reality. The EU, for example, has a very ambitious programme to develop 450GW of offshore wind potential in the North Sea (111GW by 2030).