Karnataka and Gujarat are making the most progress in overall preparedness and commitment in the transition to clean electricity, a new joint report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) and Ember shows.
The report analyses 16 States, which together account for 90 per cent of the country’s annual power requirement, across four dimensions. The dimensions track a State’s preparedness to shift away from fossil-fuel-based power, its ability to incentivise greener market participation, its power system’s reliability and its policies pushing for power sector decarbonisation.
Based on this analysis, the report authors devised the “States’ Electricity Transition (SET) scoring system,” which measures the performance of the different States in the transition to clean electricity.
The authors say that Haryana and Punjab are best positioned to further this transition, while Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal “must ramp up efforts to maximise their renewable energy generation potential and increase clean electricity transition commitments.”
Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu have started their clean electricity transitions, but progress has not been consistent across all dimensions. As the long-considered front-runners in building new renewable capacity, these two States, unsurprisingly, showed promising progress in decarbonising their power systems. Still, they fell short in their respective power sectors’ relative performance and readiness to transition to clean electricity, the study says.
“Even the long-considered front-runners of adding renewable energy capacity, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, have to improve the readiness of their power ecosystems for a clean electricity transition,” says co-author Aditya Lolla, Senior Electricity Policy Analyst, Ember.
Tamil Nadu at the bottom
Tamil Nadu was pretty low in terms of “policies and political commitments,” the report says. “This is mainly because of a lack of policy intent to move its future power system away from coal and weak banking provisions,” it says, noting further that the State has 9.7 GW of coal-based thermal power capacity either under construction or in the pre-construction stages.
“The State has been reluctant to commit to no new coal announcements despite studies suggesting that this can save billions of rupees,” it says.