https://www.greentechmedia.

com/articles/read/nrgs-david-crane-where-is-the-amazon-apple-and-
google-of-the-utility-sector#gs.iEtEoNI

http://www.clemson.edu/cecas/departments/ece/faculty_staff/faculty/rsingh.html

https://rmi.org/our-work/global-energy-transitions/india-program/

https://rmi.org/indias-mobility-rmi-urban-mobility-lab/

India is the world’s third-largest carbon polluter, and the last great hope of coal companies
around the world. Back in 2010, India’s coal pipeline stood at well over 600GW, a statistic that
had every coal industry executive in the world frothing at the mouth. As the world’s nations
gathered in 2015 in Paris, India was still insisting that in order to lift hundreds of millions of its
citizens out of poverty, it intended to continue on that path.

By December 2016, a total turnaround, with the announcement of a new energy plan to get
more than half of India’s electricity from renewables by 2027. The way the government sees it,
coal-fired power is now the risky, high cost option. Overall, 695GW of proposed coal power
capacity has been shelved or cancelled in India since 2010, over three times its operating
capacity of 219 GW. The pool of remaining coal-fired power projects at the pre-construction
stage has shrunk by 25%, or 24 GW, in the last six months alone.

Because power demand has risen slower than expected and renewable energy has come
online faster than expected, the country’s coal plants are now only running at around half their
full capacity. Two thirds of India’s existing coal power generation (94 GW) is now being sold to
utilities at rates higher than the cost of new solar and wind, and 40 GW of the country’s coal
plants have been deemed financially stressed. Keeping them running already costs India billions
of wasted dollars every year.

And it’s about to get worse for the coal executives. At the World Health Organization’s recent
Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health, Satyendra Kumar, the Deputy Secretary of
India’s Ministry of the Environment, Forests and Climate Change, announced that India would
cut fine particle air pollution by 20–30% by 2024 in the 102 cities that routinely breach air
pollution standards. As those standards cut in over the next eight years, the costs of running the
stations will continue to rise, further eating into their razor thin profit margins, and closing more
of them down.
This stuff is starting to bite. Most of the units at the Mundra plant for example (the largest coal
station in the country) have been switched off, as it is cheaper to incur a penalty for breach of
power purchase agreement than lose money by keeping them running. There is growing
concern that these kinds of stranded coal assets may present a risk to India’s banking system.
Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch see Indian banks facing US$38 billion in losses on
bad loans to the coal-fired power sector. As a result, India’s Central Electricity Authority has
proposed closing nearly 50 GW of coal capacity by 2027, and the government has announced a
moratorium on new coal plant approvals until 2027.

Economics have flipped the equation. Renewable energy costs have fallen by 50% in two years,
and are forecast to continue dropping apace. New wind and solar is now 20% cheaper than
existing coal-fired generation’s average wholesale power price. The Indian fiscal year that
ended in March 2017 was the first time ever that renewables installations outpaced coal-fired
power construction, and the following fiscal year, from April 2017 to March 2018, saw net coal
installations of 4.2 GW (down 46% year on year) and the addition of more solar than all other
technologies combined, with a total of 10.4 GW.

Investments into clean energy in India rose 22% in the first half of 2018 compared to the same
period last year. In June 2018, India increased its already ambitious clean energy target to 227
GW — a staggering 28% bump. Power Minister R. K. Singh has announced the possibility of a
100 GW solar tender program, as well as a move into offshore wind, with a total installed
capacity target of 30 GW by 2030. At this rate, India is expected to overtake China and become
the largest growth market for clean energy by the late 2020s.

https://medium.com/future-crunch/homo-electric-part-2-how-to-make-electricity-great-again-
880b99b0784b