India's electricity generation by energy source
India is the world's most populous country and its third-largest economy, yet coal still provides more than 80% of its electricity. This chart breaks down Indian power generation by source.
India’s electricity generation by energy source
India has the largest population in the world (its population grew to almost 1.5 billion this year, overtaking China) and the seventh-largest territory. Until 1947 it was the true jewel of the British Empire, its most important colony. It has always been famed for its trade routes and its wealth. India is the birthplace of religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism, though Christianity and Islam also spread there. India’s constitution recognises 21 official languages, spoken by most of the country’s population. India is a country of 1,652 dialects. It is a truly remarkable country with a deep culture and enormous potential, but also with widespread poverty.
Electricity generation in India
India is now a space and nuclear power and the world’s third-largest economy after China and the United States when measured by GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP), growing by at least 7% a year (a strong rate in today’s conditions). It is a vast untapped market that could reach China’s level of industrial growth and prosperity if history proves kinder to India. Indian industry rests on car manufacturing, oil and gas, petrochemicals, cement, consumer electronics, machine building, mining, and of course pharmaceuticals, metalworking, information technology, food processing and textiles. India also supplies programmers to multinational corporations and exports a large share of the software used by technology companies around the world.
Electricity generation in India
But a fast-growing Indian economy needs energy, and a great deal of it, at a price below that of other sources (renewables, gas, biofuels, hydrogen power and so on). India therefore relies mainly on coal, the cheapest source of energy even if it is the dirtiest. Coal-fired thermal power plants are being built in growing numbers and account for more than 80% of the country’s total electricity generation, as the chart above shows. This policy, of course, runs counter to the energy-transition agenda of the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other global Western bodies. India is showing the world that it has an independent energy policy and its own vision of national development.
Electricity generation in India
In expanding coal as a source of electricity, India is of course mindful of China’s negative experience after it halted the construction of new coal-fired plants in the expectation that renewables would fill the gap. In 2021 China suffered an energy crisis, and afterwards resumed building coal plants, adding coal-fired capacity by the tens of gigawatts a year. With this in mind, and given that coal is a cheap source of energy, India has accelerated construction of such plants. By some estimates India will commission 15.6 GW of new coal-fired capacity by the end of the year and a further 65 GW over the decade.