Talking only about coal, fossil fuels is diversionary tactic of developed nations: RK Singh on COP28

To meet the growing power demand, the government has revised its plan to increase the country’s coal-fired power generation capacity by 78-80 GW by 2030 instead of 51 GW as was planned earlier

"India's energy transition is according to national circumstances," Union Minister for Power and New and Renewable Energy RK Singh said on December 14 while justifying the country's need to add more coal-fired power generation capacity in the coming years.

When asked about the recently concluded COP28 in Dubai, Singh said India's submission was to keep the focus on emissions. "India emits 2.1 tonnes per capita, while developed nations emit 22 tonnes per capita. What needs to be reduced is the emissions. It doesn't matter if the emissions are coming from coal or petroleum. We should talk about overall emissions," he said.

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The Union minister added that even though India has decided to add 80 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired capacity by 2030, the country's total thermal capacity will come down from nearly 70 percent in 2014 to about 33 percent in 2030, which will be one of the largest reductions by any country.

"The push for phasing out coal and limiting new coal plants, which we had seen in the draft documents, were all propaganda by the developed countries. The developed countries are emitting at least three times what we are emitting, but they don't want to talk about that. So, all the talks about coal, fossil fuels are diversionary tactics by the developed countries as they don't want to talk about emissions," Singh said during an interaction with reporters.

After two weeks of hard-fought negotiations, representatives from nearly 200 countries at COP28 on December 13 agreed to begin reducing global consumption of fossil fuels to avert the worst of climate change.

"Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science,” read the Global Stocktake (GST) text. However, unlike the mention of coal, the text had no reference to oil and gas.

The final COP28 text also called for “accelerating efforts towards the phase-down of unabated coal power”. While the previous draft text also talked about limiting new coal plants, the same was deleted in the final document. This weakened language of coal phase-down would act in favour of India, which is faced with the challenge of meeting an ever-increasing power demand while keeping electricity accessible and affordable.

India will continue to rely on coal for power generation for two reasons revolving around energy security and affordability — the unprecedented growth in power demand, which is likely to touch 335 GW by 2030 from the current 240 GW, and the high costs involved in energy storage which acts as a barrier to round-the-clock renewable energy supply.

To meet the growing power demand, the government has revised its plan to increase the country’s coal-fired power generation capacity by 78-80 GW by 2030 instead of 51 GW as was planned earlier.