14 DAY TRIAL // At the beginning of this year, India high officials implemented the country's 12th Five-Year Plan for economic development, according to which considerable efforts will go into more than doubling the amount of clean power the country presently generates.
Thus, for the time being, India produces a total of 23,128 megawatts of green energy, which can be broken down as follows: 17,353 megawatts come from wind power, 941 megawatts are due to solar plants, hydro-power is responsible for 3,396 megawatts and 3,225 megawatts come from bio-power.
These figures are not at all surprising, especially since, in 2011, India's investments in renewable energy industries amounted to a staggering $10.3 billion (€roughly 8.2 billion).
Discussing these pieces of information, Aditi Dass, the director of Technologies India, argues that “The figures speak for themselves – it is evident that both the businesses and the government leaders in India already see the gigantic opportunity that exists in the Clean Revolution.
“The fact that the government is setting up such optimistic and competitive targets – and designing ways to achieve them – is itself a tremendous testimony to India’s low carbon growth story.”
As EarthTechling informs us, most of India's future investments in the renewable energy industry will go into developing more wind and solar power.
Thus, the country plans on having around 15,000 more megawatts generated by wind turbines, and solar plants are expected to boost the country's grid capacity by adding 15,000 megawatts.
Although not as much money will go into improving on the biomass or hydro-electric energy industry, these two are expected to soon provide an extra 2,700 megawatts and 2,100 megawatts, respectively.
Interestingly enough, it seems that India has been interested in going green by quite some time now: between the years 2009 and 2012, around 320 renewable energy projects were implemented in this part of the world.
Granted, most of the necessary funds came from foreign investments, but the overall end-results are nothing if not remarkable: an additional 10,400 megawatts were made available to the citizens of India by means of clean power generation technologies.
All in all, it is our belief that India's sustained efforts to go as green as possible as quickly as possible are both attention- and praise-worthy.