India’s surging economy could doom climate efforts—unless richer nations step up
No matter how fast the country builds new solar and wind farms, that alone won’t be enough.

by James Temple | Apr 24

In the flat terrain of eastern Karnataka, deep in the interior of the Indian subcontinent, you don’t see the Pavagada Solar Park coming. But when it appears, on the far side of a dusty little village, it is, all at once, everywhere.

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India is now a shining case study in how rapidly generation of renewable power can expand with government investment and support, even in a deeply poor country. But it also underscores the fact that adding clean energy and cutting climate emissions aren’t the same thing.

For India to achieve the latter, clean energy would need to replace—not simply augment—coal, which currently generates nearly 55% of the nation’s electricity. And that’s not happening anytime soon in one of the world’s fastest growing and fastest urbanizing economies.

India’s GDP could more than quintuple by 2040, more than doubling its energy demand, according to the International Energy Agency. That would represent roughly a quarter of the total global increase over that period. Air-conditioning units alone could increase by 15-fold, as citizens become better off and cities grow hotter.

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