Industrialists are counting on it. Solar panel manufacturing has been ramping up to the point where it now runs far in excess of domestic demand, at 91 GW. With lower tariffs into the US than their rivals in China and Southeast Asia, this excess of supply might make local panel makers rare beneficiaries of President Donald Trump’s war on clean energy. That certainly seems to be the assumption of a group of US competitors, who last week sought anti-dumping measures to keep Indian products out of their market.
For many years, India had a skeptical take on the energy transition, arguing since the 1970s that poverty was a more pressing problem than protecting the environment. The difference now is that zero-carbon power is decisively cheaper than the competition. Rising incomes, meanwhile, mean the government needs to also think about the needs of roughly half a billion middle-class citizens, who worry more about where to find a good job in a clean, livable city than the basics of subsistence living.
India is still building coal-fired power plants to make sure those newly-minted urbanites don’t suffer power cuts in the middle of punishing heatwaves, but they’re not necessarily being used. Thanks to milder weather than in recent years and the rising volumes of renewables pushing it off the grid, fossil-fired power generation fell 4% in the first half relative to 2024. That’s the first time it has dropped since the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, and occurred even as electricity generation rose 0.8%. Retirements of old plants mean that fossil-generation capacity has actually declined slightly so far this year.
