Climate Parliament recommends policy integration for renewable energy development to PM

BANGALORE: The Centre aims to achieve 'electricity for all’ by 2027 while 75 million households still don’t have access to electricity and only two percent of renewable energy into the grid by 2021. The gap doesn’t seem to occur to the planning commission at all. The Climate Parliament, a group of parliamentarians and experts on climate change and renewable energy, present a set of policy recommendations in the renewable energy sector to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday.

The report—RE-energizing India: Policy, regulatory and financial initiatives to augment renewable energy development in India recommends the government to set up a national clean energy access mission, enforce national action plan on climate change (NAPCC) at state levels through amendment in national electricity policy, incentivize states for increasing renewable energy purchasing obligations and compliance and mobilization of low cost funds for renewable energy projects.

The MPs who are a part of this report—JD Seelam, Jhansi Lakshmi Botcha, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Sanjay Jaiswal, KP Ramalingam, Vandana Chavan, Anup Kumar Saha, Shashi Bhusan Behera, Jayanat Chaudhary and Ali Anwar Ansari from across political parties.

Climate Parliament has been pressurizing government to encourage private sector investment in this sector and additional central assistance to such states that constantly add renewable energy to the grid. The report has in it—how the planning commission, ministry of new and renewable energy and the NAPCC’s targets are all different. This only goes to show how much serious is the Centre about tackling energy deficit. The Centre has set a target of adding 30,000Mega Watts of RE capacity in the 12th five year plan. MNRE’s strategic plan for new and renewable energy sector for the period 2011-17 has a target of adding 21,000 MW by 2017 while NAPCC targets at a 15% share of renewable energy in the grid by 2020, which Climate Parliament report analyses, corresponds to 90,000 MW addition.