New Delhi, Feb 27 (IANS) India’s national solar mission has been scaled up five-fold to generate 100,000 megawatts of power by 2022, requiring an additional investment of $100 billion, said the Economic Survey for 2014-15 which was tabled in parliament by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley Friday.
According to the annual report card on the state of the country’s economy, in the next five years the proposals for increasing the renewable energy is likely to generate business opportunities worth $160 billion in the sector.
“Some of India’s major immediate plans on renewable energy include scaling up cumulative installed capacity to 170 gegawatts (GW) and establishing a national university for renewable energy,” the survey said.
The survey pointed-out that India introduced a clean energy cess on coal in 2010 which very few countries have in the world.
The total collection so far under the national clean energy fund (NCEF) has crossed Rs.17,000 crores and till September, 2014, 46 clean energy projects worth Rs.16,511.43 crores have been recommended for funding out of this fund.
“Efforts are also under way by the government to build India’s institutional capacity for mobilizing climate change finance,” the survey said.
The survey added that the country has set up a national adaptation fund with an initial corpus of Rs.100 crores in 2014 to support adaptation actions to combat the challenges of climate change in sectors like agriculture, water and forestry.