Comparative Evaluation of Long-Term Low Carbon Electricity Transition Roadmaps for India

Undertaken By: Center for Sustainability, Policy & Technology Management (SusPoT) ,    Recent Publication: 2020

Developing and evaluating various low carbon electricity transition scenarios can be a powerful way to analyze the role of the power sector in climate mitigation. Long-term scenarios are required for an effective energy transition since they are informed by transparent, fact-based, country-specific parameters that address interdependencies of the energy transition while keeping in mind societal and economic priorities.

Several analyses, each with their own projections, already exist. Each analysis takes into account various scenarios with significant differences in projections on renewable energy and fossil fuel contributions. They also seek to calculate the costs and climate benefits arising from each scenario. These differences are a result of differences in assumptions on factors like technical potentials, costs of renewables and electricity demand projections, among others. Furthermore, most of these scenarios are developed keeping climate mitigation as their top priority and often ignore other socio-environmental aspects of the proposed transition.

It is important to to evaluate and quantify various factors in order to gain insights that can benefit the future of India’s energy policies. These include :

i) the key differences between the major electricity transition scenarios developed for the country,

ii) the co-benefits and trade-offs in different transition scenarios from multiple sustainability perspectives (apart from climate mitigation).

iii) benchmarking India’s transition roadmaps with other emerging and developed economies in the world.