The big energy challenge of the future will be supplying enough low-carbon power to meet the emerging economies’ growing demands. Although renewable capacity continues to grow, as this blog has noted in the past, notwithstanding depressed financing, waning popular interest, disappearing subsidies, and slower technological progress, there is growing concern that renewables cannot be an important part of the supply solution. A couple of recent papers have debunked this myth at least for India.
In a simple but rigorous and illuminating analysis, Professor S. P. Sukhatme shows that India’s annual demand for electricity in 2070 — when the country’s population is projected to be 1.7 billion — can be met to a large extent by a portfolio of renewable energy technologies, as shown in the figure below. Further, this is a conservative estimate since contributions from a number of other renewables, e.g., geothermal, offshore wind, tidal, etc., have not been estimated. Finally, the role of technology and innovation in improving both yield and economics have not been factored. Even so, the traditional challenges with renewables, in particular intermittency, need to be overcome to ensure reliably supply.
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