India is already making rapid strides in the arena of renewable energy and it plans to attain a target of 175GW by 2022. The target is an ambitious one but a lot of spade work is being done in key areas like solar and wind energy across the nation to meet this aim. The mega shift to renewable energy is essential for India because it needs to cut down on harmful emissions in a time-bound manner after it ratified the COP21 Paris climate agreement earlier this year.
While it is not possible to completely weed out coal based power generation, a bigger share of renewable power in the overall energy matrix will surely help put a curb on industrial pollution that has now reached alarming proportion in several cities.
“Renewable energy and solar energy in particular, is the future because it is both reliable and clean. We are aggressively pushing for the use of Concentrated Solar Technology (CST) in key installations across the nation because it will not only help us bring down the use of fossil fuels and a result, cut down on our carbon footprint but it will also ensure that we make a steady and gradual shift towards cleaner energy sources,” said Dr RP Goswami, Director/Scientist F in the Ministry.
It is interesting to note that while globally CST is being largely used only for power generation, the technology has been put to innovative use in the country and has wide scale application from sectors like Automobile, Education, Chemical, Pharmaceutical, Hotels, Hospitals, Manufacturing, laundry etc. Further, the CST led systems are increasingly being adopted by kitchens of big educational institutes, religious places/ashrams, large hotels, and even some of our Para-military installations.