Perhaps ‘India Energy Week’, the gathering that is organised annually by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, shouldn’t be called that. An apt name would be ‘India Oil and Gas Week’, because there is hardly anything else.
This year’s edition — the third — was held recently at the glittering, opulent Yashobhoomi Convention Centre in Delhi. The Ministry of Power had a pavilion at the exhibition-cum-conference event; that apart, nothing else appeared to count as energy. Biofuels and green hydrogen got their fair share, but there was not a word about coal. Wind, solar and nuclear barely got a mention — though Oil Minister Hardeep Puri, in one of the panel discussions, said green hydrogen and nuclear would be the energy sources of the future.
Permanent home for ‘India Energy Week’
The ‘India Energy Week’ event organised annually by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas will, in future, be held in Goa. The third IEW was held in Delhi while the previous two took place in Bengaluru and Goa respectively.
Oil major ONGC is building a 240-acre site, apparently lavish, with jetties and chopper landing facilities. “Next year, IEW will move to its permanent home in Goa,” said Oil Minister Hardeep Puri.
Can wind be far behind in India’s RE scheme of things?
On February 7, India’s installed solar power capacity hit the 100-GW milestone (though the website of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy still mentions 92.12 GW under its ‘achievements’). This feat took 15 years.
The wind power sector, which took off two decades earlier than solar in India, lagged due to a variety of reasons but is set to achieve its own milestone soon. As of January end, wind power installations stood at 48.36 GW — they are likely to hit the 50-GW mark at least by the end of March.
In the first 10 months of this financial year, 2,479 MW of wind power capacity was installed in India, far lower than expected. On May 29, 2024, when Global Wind Day was celebrated in Chennai, Lalith Bohra, Joint Secretary, MNRE, had said wind installations would clock 6.5-7 GW this year, compared with 3.2 GW last year.
Another milestone — rooftop solar
After solar power’s 100-GW and wind power’s 50-GW milestones, yet another notable achievement will be from the PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, which completed one year on February 13. As on January 27, the subsidised household rooftop solar scheme saw 8,46,000 installations, against the targeted 10 million by March 2027. According to a government release, the scheme is clocking 70,000 installations a month and 45 per cent of beneficiaries receive zero electricity bills.