India needs $13trn to hit net zero emissions by 2050

BLOOMBERG

India will need to invest $12.7 trillion in its energy system, or more than three times its gross domestic product, to reach net zero emissions by mid-century and help the world avert disastrous planetary warming, according to BloombergNEF.
Hitting that target early — ahead of India’s official goal of 2070, which lags the world’s largest economies — will require moving swiftly to clean-up the country’s vast and coal-dependent electricity sector, according to BNEF’s New Energy Outlook for India.
That means grid investments to handle variable renewable power, and also scaling up the cash going into green energy. The world’s third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases currently produces about 70% of its electricity from coal, and the same fossil fuel underpins a range of heavy industries, such as steel, cement and aluminum. That’s despite rapid expansion in renewable energy, with a record-high of 16 gigawatts of utility-scale solar installed in 2022.
Vast funding is required to change that dynamic, and to cope with growing demand simultaneously. Hitting the 2050 spending target in line with global climate goals means $438 billion of investment every year until the deadline, according to BNEF data, a massive jump for a country that invested $17 billion in energy transition technologies last year.
Cumulative investments to expand power generation capacity alone will have to reach $2.8 trillion by 2050 — $2.7 trillion of that would be low-carbon, or more than $90 billion a year.
“Building all the necessary infrastructure would require investments at an unprecedented scale and speed, which the Indian banks alone may not be able to meet,” said Shantanu Jaiswal, head of India research at BNEF.
Global capital has been cautious. Eight of the global top 10 pension and sovereign wealth funds are yet to invest in India’s renewable-energy sector, according to BNEF, while India’s own pension and life insurance funds face restrictions.
India has raised the question of global capital repeatedly, but has been hampered by inefficiencies in its power market and, more recently, by the indirect impact of the US Inflation Reduction Act and European moves to woo clean-power investors.