MADURAI, India — Before he agreed to serve as minister of state and take command of his country’s mammoth energy production and distribution sector, Piyush Goyal developed one of India’s most spirited political careers. “A man of ideas and competence,” according to First Post, a prominent news organization, Goyal is an accountant and lawyer who rose to the peak of Indian economic and political culture as an investment banker, member of Parliament, and treasurer of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the country’s ruling political party.
Following the May 2014 national election — a BJP triumph — Goyal seemed poised to assume any number of economic development posts in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new government. Modi recognized, though, that Goyal’s expertise in law, international finance, and politics was a near perfect fit for one of the most difficult ministerial assignments. Modi asked Goyal to make over India’s obsolete, dangerous, water-wasting electrical generating sector.
India churns with economic disruptions that are not helped at all by frequent blackouts and confrontations over scarce water between citizens and its coal-fired electrical stations. State and national agencies are burdened by corruption that impedes the fair permitting and enforcement of pollution control laws. In villages across India rural people organize to protect their water supplies and block coal mines and the construction of coal-fired power plants.
India’s leaders are attempting a delicate maneuver: stoking the fires of economic growth while jettisoning an energy strategy that relies on coal for almost 70 percent of its electricity. Goyal has moved to meet that challenge much faster than anybody anticipated. Though he has not attained the global prominence of Pope Francis, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, or Elon Musk as a leading champion for curbing climate change, Goyal belongs in the conversation. “We have crossed 10,000 [megawatts] of installed capacity of solar,” Goyal said in one triumphant tweet in mid-March. “In another 15 months we expect this to go up to 20,000 MW & 100,000 MW by 2022.”
India now competes with China, the United States, Japan, and Germany as a world-leading developer of electricity from wind, solar, biomass, and small hydropower plants. India’s generating capacity from wind power is now more than 30 gigawatts, fourth among nations, and nearly 6 gigawatts more than two years ago. India’s solar electrical generating capacity doubled in the last year to 10 gigawatts. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts, roughly the size of a large coal or natural gas power station.
Overall, India reached 50 gigawatts of renewable generating capacity in March 2017, excluding large hydro-electricity. That is twice as much as in 2012 and equal to 16 percent of India’s total generating capacity. The country ranks fifth in the world in renewable capacity, according to government figures.
India also is competing with China and the United States in the global competition to shut down old coal-fired plants and curtail development of new ones. In December 2016 India announced an energy plan to develop 275 gigawatts of generating capacity from renewable sources by 2027. That is equal to more than a quarter of all the generating capacity in the United States. The Central Electric Authority said that the goal meant that India would not need to start building another new coal-fired generating station for at least a decade and likely longer. India, in effect, is prepared to shelve 178 gigawatts of planned coal-fired generating capacity.
Goyal followed that disclosure with another – a plan to quickly close at least a dozen still operating end-of-life coal-fired plants that have a total of 11 gigawatts of generating capacity. “That one action alone will not only help us bring in more efficiency in the operation of thermal plants, but will help us reduce millions of tons of carbon dioxide that is being generated by the age-old plants,” he said in a statement. “It will help us reignite economic activity in the power sector.”
The numbers express a profound new reality in India’s energy industry that carries international significance: Climate-changing carbon emissions in India, the world’s third largest producer, are poised to start leveling off after years of sizable increases. India is joining China, the United States, and Europe in reducing carbon emissions at the same time that economic activity increases. In March, the International Energy Agency reported that in 2016, for the third year in a row, climate-changing emissions to the atmosphere did not increase. The leveling-off occurred even as the global economy expanded.
