India’s role in energy transition

Abstract This article takes stock of energy transition developments in India at different governance levels to offer examples and draw lessons-learned that can enhance our understanding of India’s potential role in the low-carbon energy transition, with particular focus on how to make transitions more inclusive of opportunities and address challenges in global South contexts. Being the world’s most populated country and the third-largest energy user and GHG emitter, India is key to the global transition from fossil to renewable energy. Energy efficiency, energy access, just transition, and renewable energy expansion are core objectives in India’s climate policies, but reaching climate, energy, and development goals simultaneously is challenging and often entails trade-offs. This article analyses the complexity of factors that influence opportunities and challenges to energy transition in India, and shows how India’s diversity and strong development-first emphasis is mirrored in energy developments around coal use and renewable energy expansion projects. The article further demonstrates a duality in India’s energy transition, from the local to the international level. One the one hand postponing the economic and societal costs of reducing coal, while on the other hand benefitting from the opportunities of new renewables, also connected to aspirations for a broader global role. As an experimental ground for renewable energy deployment and related international networks, India has shown the way in achieving co-benefits from early new renewable expansion, but several challenges remain to moving beyond low-hanging fruits and ensuring a transition that incorporates needed social redistribution of wealth and rights.