India’s efforts to check carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement goal of confining global warming to below two degrees Celsius is possible but looks increasingly challenging to achieve, a BloombergNEF’s (BNEF) report reveals.

Its analysis indicates that India’s energy mix must undergo significant transformation over the next two decades, with all unabated fossil-fuel-based power generation exiting the grid by 2045.

“India’s window to curb its carbon emissions in line with the major goal of the Paris Agreement – holding global warming to well below two degrees Celsius and avoiding the worst impacts of climate change – is still possible, however, it looks increasingly hard to achieve,” claims the BNEF New Energy Outlook: India report.

The report builds upon and expands the results of the New Energy Outlook 2024, introducing two updated climate scenarios, the Net Zero Scenario (NZS) and a base-case Economic Transition Scenario (ETS).

India must swiftly decarbonise its power sector, the largest emitter in the country, to stay on track, more than tripling its solar and wind capacity by 2030 to 494 gigawatts in BNEF’s NZS.

“India’s window to stay on a well-below-2-degrees pathway is closing, fast. Rapidly moving to a clean power system based on wind, solar and energy storage will be essential to cost-effectively reduce carbon emissions,” said Shantanu Jaiswal, head of BNEF in India and Southeast Asia.

Most of the heavy lifting in India’s emission-abatement trajectory needs to be done in the next decade as emissions from all sectors must peak within the next 10 years, he added.

Checking climate change

The report’s NZS, which is consistent with a 67 per cent chance of holding global warming to 1.75 degrees Celsius, demonstrates that there is limited room for further carbon emissions growth and that the peak needs to be accelerated across all sectors within the next ten years.

India’s emissions from the power, transport and buildings sectors must peak in this decade, followed by industrial emissions by the early 2030s, and then rapidly decline using a mix of mature and nascent technology pathways.

The alternative scenario, ETS, which assumes no new policies are implemented, breaches the Paris Agreement with a global warming result of 2.6 degrees Celsius and demonstrates how far the energy transition can progress based on economically viable and commercially ready technologies.

India is one of the few countries that would meet its updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), even under BNEF’s base-case economics-led pathway.

“However, the NZS results imply that for India to remain aligned with the Paris Agreement, the country’s emissions increase from energy-related sectors needs to be limited to only 106 per cent by 2030 relative to its 2005 baseline—far below the 175 per cent increase in the ETS and the 192 per cent jump implied by its NDC,” it added.