BPRO 25800 (Spring 2021/Winter 2024) Are we doomed? Confronting the End of the World

Names: Lance Johnson, Dillon Ramlochun, Ishaan Patel and Chase Denholm

Project Format: Research Paper (Link to Paper included at end of Blog Post)

An Overview of India’s Current and Future Sources of Energy Generation (Blog Post)

     For our final project, our team comprised of Dillon Ramlochun, Ishaan Patel, Chase Denholm and Lance Johnson wrote a research paper that explores India’s current and future sources of energy generation. Our inspiration for this paper came from three lectures: the Environmental Devastation lecture from week 2, the Social Inequality lecture from week 5, and the Policy lecture from week 6. As this blog post is as an auxiliary piece to our research paper, we will use this as an opportunity to bring the paper to life in ways that might seem informal or out of scope within the research paper itself. To introduce the roadmap of this blog post, first we will expand upon the motivations behind choosing India’s energy generation as the topic for our paper, then we will transition into why we thought to structure the paper the way that we did, after which we will underscore the key takeaways that we hope to impart on the readers of our research, and finally we will acknowledge the limitations of our research.

The motivation behind choosing India as the country of focus for our research is that India will soon overtake China as the most populous country in the world. Since energy demand is directly proportional to population growth, and since the average citizen of India is quite poor with a GDP per capita of only $2,100, it follows that India is a unique case study for examining energy consumption (especially since their federal government is committed to being carbon emission free by 2050). In order for India to go from their pre-Covid carbon emission level of 2.6 billion tons to 0 tons in less than 30 years, a combination of technology development (such as Carbon Sequestration Technology), renewable and green energy subsidies and carbon taxes must be employed. The aspect of this strategy that our group is fascinated by is how much each factor will contribute to the drop in carbon levels on a factor-by-factor basis. Given that India is also subsidizing oil and gas companies (alongside renewable energy companies) and that India is unwilling to levy widespread carbon taxes for fear of slowing economic growth, our intuition is that technological developments in grid infrastructure and advancements in direct carbon sequestration related technology are India’s most prominent avenues for cutting emissions. As seen in our featured image, in recent years India has been able to lessen their emissions, but emissions remain quite high – I will expand upon this further in the “takeaways” portion of the blog. We will now transition into briefly explaining the structure of our research paper.

Our paper is organized into 10 sections – beginning with an introduction (section I), and ending with a conclusion (section IX), followed by a citation section (section X). The core 7 sections pertaining to Indian Energy generation are ordered as follows: current carbon footprint landscape (II), future carbon footprint landscape (III), current green energy landscape (IV), current renewable energy landscape (V), future climate change policies and our proposed solutions (VI), barriers to keeping pace with developed countries (VII) and finally a data analysis section detailing how increased spending on renewable energy projects decreases carbon emissions. We decided to organize our research this way because we wanted to make it approachable for readers that are completely unfamiliar with India’s energy landscape. Additionally, by thoroughly detailing India’s current energy situation before delving into their future situation, we sought to enable the reader to come to their own conclusions, as opposed to steering them toward one of our own. This point serves as a seamless transition to the key takeaways that we wanted readers to learn from our paper.

There are four primary concepts that we wanted to impart on the reader. First that 80% of India’s energy over the past two decades has been supplied by coal, oil and traditional biomass sources – this is reflected in our featured image which shows that on a nominal basis C02 emission are rising (but what it does not show is that on a % of total energy produced basis renewable energy sources are actually rising). Given that coal is the most cost-efficient source of energy production in India and given that India is a developing country that cannot fully afford renewable energy at scale (for the immediate future), coal is very difficult to replace as the primary energy source of choice for corporations and consumers alike. The second concept that we want readers to take away is that COVID-19 may turn out to be a catalyst for India’s emissions going forward. During COVID-19, energy consumption declined by 30% below levels for the trailing year. Since the precedent has been set that working from home can be more productive than working in person, firms that continue to do this in the aggregate will lessen the aggregate amount of transportation required for Indian people thereby lessening emissions (remains to be seen to what extent this will persist, but government models previously forecasted 50% energy demand growth by 2050 and they now forecast 30% energy demand growth). The third take away for readers is the potential role that the Indian private sector could play in lessening emissions – though carbon sequestration technology is in its infancy, there is a small-scale plant in Thoothukudi, India that is showing promise by nearly cost efficiently capturing 60,000 tons of Carbon Dioxide per year. If India can continue to invest in plants like this, they would materially lessen their carbon emissions. The fourth and final takeaway that parallels the third takeaway is the fact that India’s optimal decision is not to focus all of their resources in lessening emissions. This is because the opportunity cost of doing so is substantial economic growth – to the tune of ~7% GDP growth per year. Given that India’s GDP per capita is 1/5th of China’s and 1/30th of the United States’, the calls for India to accelerate their decline in carbon emissions are unfair and are an example of environmental colonialism. Having introduced four of the many takeaways that we want our readers to come away with, we will now transition to briefly discuss the limitations of our research.

The limitations of our paper primarily manifest themselves in our data analysis section, as this is where we attempted to use a regression analysis to estimate the impact of increased investment from the Indian government in new green and renewable energy sources. One of the assumptions that we relied on in order to make this regression was ceteris paribus, or other things equal, which avoided several potentially confounding factors, in addition to the opportunity cost of investing in renewables, as opposed to other avenues like entrepreneurship that promote economic growth (as pointed out in our PowerPoint Presentation Q&A 🙂 ). In spite of these limitations, our group decided to keep the regression in our paper, as it adds a refreshing dimension of creativity. We hope that you agree in reading our paper and that you come away having learned a thing or two about India’s current and future sources of energy generation! As per Chia-Yun’s recommendation, attached below is a google document link to our paper:

Link to Paper:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d9it5OdWM1vrwBWCVOAezAk96L4hFzD1XhaByGdSdkE/edit?usp=sharing

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