I'll presenting my Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work at a special plenary session of the India Smart Grid Forum (ISGF)'s annual India Smart Utility Week 2024 in March.
In prep calls and research, there's a bunch of great news. India is definitely working to leapfrog the west into a cleaner affluence.
The latest iteration of the Short List in Forbes: https://lnkd.in/gtFFnE4R
India is a huge, complex and diverse country, now the most populous in the world. In many ways it's leapfrogging the west as it develops.
All heavy rail will be electrified by the end of this year, something that they only started in earnest in the past decade. And, of course, it's a passenger rail society, one with just under 400 billion revenue passenger kilometers in 2022, close to the same as all of Europe and recovering toward the pre-pandemic maximum of 500 billion.
They've also been building a lot of HVDC transmission as they more closely integrate their 28 states and bring more renewables on line.
They have thousands of electric buses on the roads of their cities already, and have a target of 50,000 by 2027. Further, their two- and three-wheelers have been electrifying rapidly, part of what Bloomberg NEF reported was a trend with the greatest impact on avoiding petroleum demand globally so far.
India is still a developing economy, but has seen an average of just over 6% of GDP growth since 2000. Its trajectory is different than China's but it's distinctly upward. That's bearing fruit, as a 2022 paper found that the percentage of people living in poverty in the country had fallen to 10.2%.
I consider one of the greatest advances in human rights that it is possible to create is to bring people out of poverty, to create the conditions where they have food and shelter security and hence the opportunity to grow. India is doing that, and I celebrate it.
But of course, this is part of the global narrative of climate change versus development. The fossil fuel industry and many others believe that the developing world will burn the fossil fuels that the developed world is setting aside.
