Tag: India
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Where is India investing more, fossil fuels or renewables?
Is India embracing renewables or fossil fuels? On the one hand, there are the commitments India has made to decarbonise its economy in the face of climate change that is already impacting the country grievously. Then there are the planners who are convinced that fossil fuels are imperative to provide the electricity needed for India’s […]
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Five questions India needs to answer about its PLI scheme
India is trying to become a manufacturing powerhouse in a clutch of old and new sectors. Its policy instrument, the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, stands on a mix of old and new pillars—high import tariffs to coax companies to stop importing and source in India instead; a focus on creating a few champions in each […]
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Making sense of India’s energy sector
For a year-and-a-half now, I have been trying to understand the largest processes shaping India’s energy sector. These variously support/weaken the growth of the principal forms of energy India depends on – and, consequently, determine the country’s energy transition. Note: Regular readers of this blog — both of them, that is to say — will […]
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CAA/NRC protests. A sense of how deep they spread.
Early in January 2020, as protests against NRC/CAA began spreading across India, I began scouring twitter trying to gauge how anger was spreading across India. Which cities, towns, districts and mohallas were seeing protests? The exercise was slapdash but heady — that was, after all, a lovely moment in India’s otherwise depressing recent history. Nothing […]
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Coal India chooses energy-intensive manufacturing; Adani and NTPC chase vertical integration.
For a long while now, from the time #DespiteTheState went to the presses, I have been chasing a story on coal. You know the score. India’s coal sector is behaving in discontinuous ways — Coalblock auctions find few bidders; Coal India mulls diversification into Aluminium smelting and solar ingot/panel manufacturing; power producers like NTPC and […]
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The four hidden risks lurking in India’s gas expansion plans
India’s plans to remake itself into a gas-based economy are floundering. As the previous story in this series described, not only is the fuel controlled so tightly by the government that players struggle for viability, India is also running out of cheap domestic gas. The country’s new gas finds – in deepwater fields – and […]
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Why India’s gas boom is running out of steam
Seen from a distance, India’s gas sector seems to have everything going for it. Given how energy-starved India is – not to mention climate commitments to reduce its economy’s carbon intensity – there is abundant demand. Given the global surge in gas production even as traditional markets slow, supply is not a problem either. Helping […]
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Can Gas Account for 15% of India’s Energy Mix?
In March this year, union minister Dharmendra Pradhan published an article. Most of the piece, titled Why India Needs A New Energy Roadmap, listed the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government’s efforts to make India a gas-based economy. The government, wrote India’s petroleum and natural gas minister, wants to take India towards renewables. […]
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