Last year, India hit a milestone in its push for energy independence: After years of building solar parks and wind farms, the country said it could generate more than half of its electricity from renewable sources.
Getting that electricity to homes and businesses is a whole other challenge.
The war in Iran has made India increasingly reliant on renewable energy, as the conflict has choked the flow of imported gas and oil. And it has exposed the limits of the country’s outdated, rickety grid, which is struggling to deliver reliable, affordable power for its 1.4 billion people.
India’s investments in renewable energy, especially solar, have been staggering. By the end of last year, it had 55 solar parks, including one that stretched across 14,000 acres of desert. The solar farms alone were producing 40 gigawatts — enough energy to power about 80 million rural households. Smaller rooftop arrays sprouted seemingly everywhere.
India announced last summer that it could meet 50 percent of its electricity requirements with renewables alone, years ahead of schedule. But solar and wind power don’t flow on demand.
India’s critical challenge is storing surplus energy from peak production and delivering it consistently when people need it to run businesses or turn on a stove. Battery systems and transmission lines can’t be built fast enough.
Only about a quarter of the power generated by India’s new sources actually reaches consumers, compared with more than half in China. As a result, India is still relying on oil and gas imported from the Persian Gulf to bridge the gap, a vulnerability rippling across the economy as supplies are disrupted.
India’s currency has weakened as oil costs have risen, averaging $120 a barrel for its buyers. The crisis is weighing on the country’s long-term growth prospects, forcing energy-intensive industries to lay off workers and factories that pour steel, cast ceramics and weave fabric to slow production.
For Ujjwal Sikdar and his wife, Mitthu, migrant laborers in Gurugram, a skyscraper-studded satellite city of New Delhi, losing access to fuel means cooking over firewood.
Ms. Sikdar, who earns $220 a month as a house cleaner, said her husband now walks outside the city to gather sticks for cooking because black-market gas prices have quadrupled.
“The smoke, the soot, the time it takes — it’s exhausting me,” Ms. Sikdar said. She no longer makes flatbreads for her husband and son, only rice and dal.
Some neighbors have given up on life in Gurugram and returned to their villages. Reverse migration from city to countryside, as India experienced during the pandemic, can have catastrophic effects on the broader economy.
Yet switching to an electric burner is not an option for families like the Sikdars because energy bills are too high and the supply is too erratic to meet their essential needs.
Amitabh Kant, a former head of a government think tank, wrote last week that India’s shift to renewable energy had been impressive but “too cautious” given its exposure to the risk of “wars, shipping disruptions and maritime standoffs.”
India is more dependent on imported oil than it was in 1990 — or even a decade ago — as the number of cars on the road every year rises faster than domestic oil production.
While electric vehicles are expected to ease that reliance, imported oil and gas will still be needed to make jet fuel, plastics and fertilizer. But Sumant Sinha, the founder and chief executive of ReNew, a giant clean energy company based in Gurugram, said imports accounted for 31 percent of total energy consumption, down from 38 percent in 1990.
The next step, Mr. Sinha said, is ensuring that electricity “not just be abundant, but must be always on and precisely timed.” Only then can India begin to reduce its dependence on imported energy, he said.
Coal still dominates India’s electricity supply. A well-run solar plant delivers only about 20 percent of its capacity, compared with 75 percent to 100 percent for fossil-fuel facilities.
India is pursuing multiple ways to ease the bottlenecks between power supply and demand. The most ambitious focus is on converting abundant solar energy into forms that can be stored and used later. Some projects pump water into reservoirs to generate hydroelectric power on demand, while others produce “green ammonia,” storing energy in a chemical form when the sun is shining.
In one form or another, most solutions depend on batteries, said Agnes Dasewicz, chief investment officer at the Global Energy Alliance, a nonprofit based in New York. Her organization helped set up India’s first utility-scale battery system in Kilokri, a neighborhood in New Delhi, less than a year ago. Since then, she said, utilities across the country have come asking how they can do the same.
At noon on a sunny day during a recent site visit, a local engineer turned to Ms. Dasewicz and nodded at the humming battery banks. “That’s the sound of money,” he said, listening to the batteries fill up with some of the cheapest electricity in the world. Annual costs to consumers have come down by about 55 percent, according to the G.E.A.
The savings, Ms. Dasewicz said, come from charging the batteries when electricity is cheapest and then discharging it at night, when demand peaks, to the 12,000 homes that the local power station serves.
However, achieving a more efficient grid and energy independence requires equipment from China. Chinese companies dominate the manufacturing of nearly every component of a modern grid, including solar panels, high-voltage cables, transformers and batteries.
Like many other countries, India is in a bind. While it wants to reduce its reliance on Middle Eastern oil, there is growing unease that overreliance on China could undermine economic and national security.
“India must not look toward escaping from one dependency only to walk into another,” warned Mr. Kant, the former think tank leader.
Alex Travelli is a correspondent based in New Delhi, writing about business and economic developments in India and the rest of South Asia.
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