India is the fourth largest energy consumer, and its energy demand will quadruple by 2030. This project seeks to understand the political economy of energy in India. Can India address its energy sustainability issues with its evolving energy policy landscape and strategies? How will the India’s changing political dynamics affect the growth and development of its energy sector? What will be the likely domestic and international implications of its energy policy formulations? The research team systematically characterizes and describes Indian energy policies, initially focusing on solar policy, but in the future across the fuel mix. The team is also developing a research platform that ties together power generation, energy access, and energy policies. We synthesize these efforts with a multidisciplinary human geography approach, to evaluate the effectiveness of Indian energy policies and the impact of a changing Indian fuel mix on global markets.
The current work focuses on developing a comprehensive reference tool that indexes India’s renewable energy policies. Moreover, the team is categorizing, in detail, the location and particulars of electricity production across the country, so as to better evaluate the impact of policies on the universal provision of energy access. This work seeks to facilitate the understanding of the current policy instruments, and enable quantitative analysis and assessment of exogenous factors that impact policy effectiveness.