Listening Brief

India needs power. But while coal industry advocates have tried to make energy poverty a moral issue, arguing that renewables cannot meet the demand, Charles’s guest Nikit Abhyankar from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been busy working out how India can achieve – or at least get close to achieving – the hugely ambitious goals for renewable energy set by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In this episode Nikit outlines the current state of India’s current electricity system, its limitations and financial challenges, and discusses ingenious plans for grid integration of various renewables, the special benefits of electric vehicles for Indian driving conditions, ideas about how the uptake of air conditioning could be managed without making demand sky-rocket, the opportunities for “ultra-efficient” appliances that could help India leapfrog developed countries, and the significant health burden of India continuing its reliance on coal as the mainstay of power generation.… Read the rest