India has often talked about curbing emissions and increasing forest cover to make progress toward the pledges under the Paris climate change accord. However, has not spoken much about renewable energy.
The pandemic has halted work and projects resulting in more obstacles and lesser chances of achieving the goal to increase renewable energy capacity to 175 GW by 2022. Solar and wind energies make a total of 160 GW and India can fall 36% short of achieving the target.
These numbers shed light on the structural problems faced by India towards decarbonization. The domestic power suppliers controlling almost 90% of electricity transactions struggle to handle losses creating more debt. Which further impacts their ability to purchase sufficient power to service customers, leading to deferred payments to power producers and curbing the overall growth in India.
Financial distress among the state retailers is one of the major reasons for the set target to seem out of reach. Several projects that had been auctioned by the federal government struggled to find buyers. Approximately one-fourth of wind projects which were awarded in auctions failed to take off because of problems related to distribution utilities.
According to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Debasish Mishra, the country needs to stop its dependency on state power distribution companies for the expansion of green capacity. If the dependency persists the climate targets will be at risk.