Forums like the International Solar Alliance are important in providing more teeth to the world’s fight against climate change, but it is even more important that we internalise the benefits in our own energy infrastructure

As the Indian Government prepares to assume a leadership role in the first ever mega summit of the International Solar Alliance (ISA) next month, there is a need to focus on the immediate necessity of streamlining our energy policy framework with India’s immense potential for clean energy and its growing diplomatic leadership of climate negotiations. In the absence of further rigorous action back home, the ISA’s potential benefits for India will remain underutilised.

And benefits of the ISA will be many. Conceived with the primary objective of aggregating energy demand across the countries lying fully or partially between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, the ISA is one of the important treaty-based mechanisms that can actually provide teeth to the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement and the climate negotiations, before and after, have been stuck due to contestation between the developed and developing countries over finance and technology transfer. Various funding forums of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have suffered due to lack of funding from rich countries, while the latter also continues to be reluctant when it comes to sharing knowledge and dispensing Intellectual Property hurdles for developing technology.

The ISA will be the first-of-its kind legal body to plug these gaps in international climate action. Substantively, it will be more than a forum for collaboration between project developers and bankers as it will collaborate with other global energy forums, such as the International Energy Agency, which houses a major chunk of the world energy consumption and whose formal membership India acquired last year. In addition, funding forums like the Green Climate Fund and the Global Environmental Facility have also expressed eagerness to partner with the ISA. All these partnerships will not only make advantageous inroads into the opaque working of some of these funds, but also help the ISA achieve its demand aggregation objective better.

That the ISA’s headquarters are based in India and that its members belong to the majority of African, South Asian and vulnerable Pacific island states, further strengthens India’s leadership in climate negotiations and may even herald new kind of country groupings, where the least developed countries and the island states may collaborate with the developing, instead of the developed nations.

Beyond these political benefits of the ISA, which seem to be a sure guarantee to India, the latter needs to ensure that it is able to better internalise these benefits in its own energy infrastructure. For that, long-standing issues with the power sector needs to be dealt with, such as having a proper policy framework in place for rooftop solar, dealing with cross-subsidisation due to inefficient state politics, allocating funding for distributed solutions like Decentralised Renewable Energy grids and curbing inequality of supply in the power sector.

With more than 80 per cent of electricity subsidy payments going to households above the poverty line and with subsidies for the poor, including cross subsidies, being below the cost of recovery, India’s power sector continues to be plagued by the perennial subsidy problem. In fact, according to the 2016 data released by the International Institute for Sustainable Development last month, India gave just 0.8 per cent of its electricity subsidies for distributed solutions, while coal, oil and gas transmission and distribution received about $20 billion, with much of these being price support subsidies for artificially low tariffs.

With the electricity generated from coal having the highest levels of carbon emissions, the current subsidy structure effectively invests the most in dirty fuel. Such damning facts would belie India’s show-casing of its climate commitments at the forthcoming ISA summit.

Another sticky issue at the ISA may be India’s proposed import duty of 70 per cent on imported solar panels that has crossed even the US’  move towards solar protectionism. That the Government could not harmonise this proposal with the fact that such high duties would also mean high costs of production for the local producers and inability to tap foreign investments on which it relies for clean energy, points to a policy framework that continues to be vague.

While subsidy problems and supply issues can be addressed by off-grid solutions like mini and micro grids supplemented by options like rooftop solar, which would dispense with the need for cross-subsidisation and also prevent power theft, since decentralised networks can autonomously disconnect from the main grid and function independently to reduce the possibility of thefts and diversions, the current policy framework does not support these transitions as the framework for solutions like rooftop solar remains missing. Currently, out of the total installed solar power capacity of 20GW, the ground mounted solar is around 19GW and roof top is only 1.4GW.

Even achieving this 19GW is a big success — as before the Modi Government assumed office, India’s installed solar capacity was just 2.5GW, as well as the promise of electrification for all, on which again, the Government has done well, but by being limited to urban and peri-urban households. But by setting a 100GW solar target, the Modi Government is competing with breaking its own records, through which it can achieve leadership at climate forums like the ISA.  Unless

India’s political vision on climate change is supplemented by disentangling the complicated web of the power sector, India’s energy gap will continue to persist.

(The writer is with the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies  and writes for The Resurgent India Trust)