INDIA

India has the world’s largest capacity of operating coal plants behind China. It is also the world’s biggest coal producer and consumer after China. While the nation’s power mix has long been vastly dominated by coal, the share of coal in India's total power generation capacity finally dipped below 50% in 2024 as a result of increasing renewable energy capacity additions. Continued cost decreases for renewable energy, coupled with worsening health and environmental issues, have triggered discussions around stranded fossil fuel assets and closing existing coal plants, but the government continues to push for new coal capacity to be built. Despite the recent boost in renewables, India continues to expand its coal fleet and coal plant retirements have all but come to a halt in 2023 and 2024. Although India’s 2018 National Electricity Plan had identified approximately 48 gigawatts (GW) of coal for retirement by 2027, the government appeared to be backtracking on its coal phasedown plans in early 2023 when it advised utilities to hold off on coal-fired power plant retirements until 2030. Meanwhile, the country continues to encourage the development of new higher-efficiency plants of greater capacity, with nearly 30 GW under construction and another 68 GW in pre-construction development as of mid-2024. In the first half of 2024 alone, over 16 GW of completely new coal capacity was proposed and another 7 GW was reactivated after years of stalled or halted development.

In 2023, the Central Electricity Authority's National Electricity Plan predicted that coal would comprise less than one-third of the country's total installed capacity by 2031-2032, with non-fossil based energy sources accounting for approximately 68% of the total capacity. This change would be in line with India’s Paris Agreement targets, updated in August 2022, to reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 45% by 2030. However, in absolute terms, coal use is expected to increase as the nation’s overall energy demand grows. India has set an ambitious target to deploy 450 GW of renewable energy by 2030, which is critical to meet growing demand with clean energy. India has not put out details backing its 2070 Net Zero target announced in 2021. In contrast to climate commitments and previous coal phasedown goals, the government of India announced in 2023 that it would indeed double coal production by 2030 and add 88 GW of thermal power plant capacity by 2032, much of which will be coal, in order to meet growing demand.