India Pauses Plans to Add New Coal Plants for Five Years, Bets on Renewables

news.slashdot.org

16 points·dlb007··3 comments

Here's the original article it links to:

https://apnews.com/article/india-coal-pause-plan-climate-ren...

Some of the useful tidbits:

- India currently plans on reaching net-zero by 2070.

- This does pause any coal power plants under construction, and for now doesn't prevent planning to add new coal power plants after 2027

- Lots of increased electricity demand during the day to to hotter weather and longer summers because of climate change can be met by solar power.

- India plans on adding 500 GW of clean energy by 2030, but needs to pick up the pace to meet the target (from 17 GW constructed/ year to 40 GW constructed/year ).

- Instead of 8GW of new Coal capacity, India would be building out battery storage instead.

I do wonder how needs will go down, if India's population starts dropping earlier than expected. India's population is expected to start dropping by 2050.

Considering the relatively low level of development of many areas in India and the fact they are developing, I expect that demand per capita for about anything will significantly increase in the coming decades. You'd need a drastic population decline to offset that, I think.

It's guaranteed to increase. The question is how fast will it increase, and will it increase more slowly than expected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com