India Government pushes for Offshore Wind Energy, Pumped Storage and Hydrogen to meet Paris goals

The Indian government has already seen good success in solar energy as well as onshore wind energy with the country being one of the biggest capacity developers in these green energy areas. However, the future growth of these renewable energy sources will depend on integrating their variable generation profiles effectively as they are both intermittent and variable. Solar energy and wind energy already dominate the new capacity development accounting for almost 70-80% of new power plants being built. But as the overall capacity of these variable sources grows, integrating them into the grid will become a bigger challenge.

Storage both in terms of lithium as well as pumped storage are looked upon as the most viable forms of storage that can be currently integrated with variable power sources. NTPC, which is government-owned and one of the largest companies in the power sector globally has planned to set up 1 GW of lithium energy storage across its numerous plants around the country. This is expected to give a big push to large-scale grid storage. The other plan is to rapidly develop the pumped energy storage sources. This is considered as one of the cheapest forms of storage and it is projected that India has around 96 GW of potential which is more than enough to meet the requirements of storage as estimated by CEA.

Along with storage, the government also wants to promote hydrogen which is a new form of storage as well as an energy carrier. Like storage, it can be used both to integrate power generation from wind and solar as well as used as an energy storage/power source in transportation. Green hydrogen which is entirely generated from clean sources of energy is looked upon as the next trillion-dollar green industry which can help both the power and the transport sectors to decarbonize. As an initial push, the ministry plans to set up targets of green hydrogen for fertilizer and refining industries which are the biggest users of hydrogen currently. This will help in increasing scale and bringing down costs. Offshore wind energy is another fledgling green source that the government wants to push as land becomes scarce in the country to set up onshore wind energy plants. The government will give some sort of viability funding to give an initial push to offshore wind energy plants which have never really taken off despite seeing huge cost declines and capacity increases in other countries like the UK and Denmark.