India must set a higher bar on clean energy targets

At the historic Paris Agreement in 2015, India promised that by 2030, 40 per cent of its power capacity would come from non-fossil sources. It got there in 2021, nine years early. It also pledged to cut the emissions intensity of its economy, the carbon emitted per rupee of GDP, by 33-35 per cent from 2005 levels. It met that goal too, with a decade to spare. In 2022, it raised the bar to 50 per cent clean energy capacity, clearing it in 2025, five years ahead of schedule. Few major economies can boast of a record of consistently hitting climate targets. The problem with India is, the government’s pledges ask little more than what the country is already on track to do.

India is gaming a system that only works if countries push themselves. With the Hormuz crisis sending oil back above $100 a barrel, and ahead of COP31, which opens in Antalya on November 9, it’s time for India to set ambitious climate targets and deliver on them — because this is now the cheaper, safer path for India itself.

Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the pledges at the heart of the Paris Agreement, are supposed to be ambitious national goals aimed at reducing GHG emissions. However, India’s targets have routinely been weak and not aligned with the aim of staying below 1.5 °C.

March’s pledge raises similar concerns about scope and ambition, despite an incremental increase in targets. India now promises 60 per cent clean energy capacity by 2035, despite already reaching nearly 53 per cent in February. It also promises to cut emissions intensity by 47 per cent by 2035, a tiny two-point increase from its 2030 target. Meeting this target requires less than half the annual pace of improvement India has managed so far, at a time when climate impacts continue to be felt across the globe. Intensity as a metric is skewed because it measures emissions relative to economic output. For example, if an economy doubles while cutting intensity by 40 per cent, it will still emit 20 per cent more than it did earlier.

In September, the UN announced the failure to limit global warming to 1.5 °C, calling for mass carbon removal, with no actual feasible ways to do so. Yet India’s pledges place no limit on how much it can emit. India reports steady reductions on paper while its total emissions keep rising because of its focus on emissions intensity. Most other major economies have committed to absolute limits, including China, which adopted its first absolute target last year. India is now the largest emitter still in the Paris Agreement without one. New Delhi understandably guards its right to grow. But it is precisely because of what India will build in the coming decades that it should set absolute targets and build the grid to deliver clean power.

What India’s pledges leave out is also telling. Reuters reports that the country wants 307 gigawatts of coal capacity by 2035, 46 per cent more than the capacity in 2025. Coal still generates more than two-thirds of India’s electricity, and clean sources supplied just 29 per cent of India’s power last year, despite a capacity of over 50 per cent. A coal plant approved this decade could still be running in the 2060s.

This is a strange moment to double down on fossil fuels. Since the war with Iran began in February, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has been severely disrupted for months. About half of India’s crude imports pass through the strait, and Qatar and UAE supply more than half of its liquefied natural gas. This is the exposure of a country that imports 88 per cent of its crude oil.

Coal cannot solve this issue; oil and gas fuel India’s cars and kitchens. The way out is to electrify them. Increasingly, the cheapest way to do that is the sun. Madhya Pradesh recently bought solar power backed by batteries at 2.70 rupees per kilowatt-hour, India’s lowest price yet for such a project. In a national auction for round-the-clock clean power, winning bids came in at 5.25 rupees, fixed for 25 years, while coal contracts signed in 2025 started at 5.38 to 6.30 rupees and will rise with fuel costs. The IEA has estimated that a clean-energy path would cut India’s oil import bill by $1.4 trillion over two decades, enough on its own to pay for the extra investment.

Instead of setting itself an easier target, India should be more ambitious.

Instead, India should name the year its power-sector emissions will peak and set an absolute limit rather than its current intensity goals, the kind the Paris Agreement explicitly encourages developing countries to move toward.

Second, measure what matters: set targets for clean electricity actually generated, not just installed capacity. Chile has done this: its renewables law required 20 per cent of its electricity generation to come from new renewables like wind and solar by 2025. It hit the target six years early and raised its goal to 70 per cent renewable electricity by 2030.

Third, and most urgently, build the grid. India’s problem is no longer generating clean power; it’s delivering it. The country curbed clean power output in most months of 2025 because the grid couldn’t absorb it. Over the past five years, it built only about 80 per cent of its planned transmission capacity, and on a single day this March, it lost enough renewable power to supply five million urban households because transmission lines couldn’t carry it. China faced the same problem a decade ago. After investing in power lines linking its windy, sunny north to cities in the south and east, it cut wind and solar curtailment from 16 per cent in 2012 to under 3 per cent by 2022.

India has made a habit of beating the climate promises it files at the United Nations. It’s time to file promises worth beating.

The writer is MPP candidate at Harvard, former researcher at ISB’s Bharti Institute of Public Policy, and co-author of research for IPCC’s Special Report on Climate Change and Cities