India is raising the target for renewable energy capacity from 175 GW to 450 GW

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on a mission to switch to renewable to cut harmful emissions. At the UN Action Climate Summit on September 23, Modi declared that he was raising the target for renewable energy capacity from 175 GW to 450 GW. Modi also said that he was going to make the transport sector greener by switching to e-cars.

The road to achieving this, however, is not a smooth one. Producing lithium-ion batteries, which power e-cars, at a scale that is both economically viable and readily available (in the same way that China does) is a tough task. So how did China do it?

Beginning in the 2000s, China began spending heavily on research and development (R&D). Its domestic spending on R&D rose from $9 billion in 2000 to $293 billion in 2018, making it the second-highest spender in the world, behind the US. Along the way, China identified and acquired leading technology through acquisitions and contracts. Gradually, it became less and less reliant on foreign technology. For example, China had spent 13 years producing LCD panels with the help of Japanese and Korean corporations before it became the second-largest LCD panel-maker in the world in 2016. In 2004, China had worked out technology-transfer agreements with multiple foreign corporations to develop high-speed rail before it was able to develop a superior technology indigenously by 2017. Now, India, too, has claimed the mantle of the cheapest solar producer in the world this year. But the growth of solar power surged between the period of 2015-18, the same period in which the US backed India with multi-billion dollar programmes to boost clean initiatives and the period in which Chinese investment in renewable soared. China accounted for 45 per cent of the world’s total investments on renewable in 2017 and 89 per cent of India’s solar cell imports last year. In that period, India’s solar capacity had risen by 21.5 GW. Before 2015, it had only 3.7 GW of installed solar capacity.

Making a battery as a downstream value-added product from the extract metal compound would require proprietary technology,” says Biplob Chatterjee, an exploration geologist with vast national and international experience in the mining sector. India simply does not have access to that kind of technology because only a few companies in the world do. The government, in turn, holds a tight-grip on the mineral sector itself. Less than 20 per cent of what geologists call “geochemical mapping”, to locate where new minerals might be located, has been completed to date.

It is in this context that worries mount, never mind the widening trade deficit with China, over India’s e-car mission. In setting up stringent targets to achieve climate targets, it is worth asking if India has missed the bulls eye.