Many companies have shown interest to set up renewable power plants in the country and some have assured to manufacture equipment as well. At a Renewable Energy Global Investors Meet (RE-Invest), PM had said there should be thrust on equipment manufacturing under the ‘Make in India’ plan as it will go a long way in job creation. While unveiling the three-day conference, he said, “Solar, wind and biomass sources of energy are the way forward and the government is working towards making solar power more viable.” He added that there is a need to develop hybrid plants as well for optimum utilisation of available land. (Mumbai, Feb 14, 2016)

Renewable energy companies including Suzlon and Gamesa have committed to manufacture equipment to help generate 11,000 mw and 7,500 mw of power respectively to be used in the non conventional energy side. India’s largest power producer NTPC has also said it would generate 10,000 mw of power through green sources in the next five years. Among others are Welspun Energy with a target to generate 11,000 mw renewable energy, followed by ReNew Power 11,500 mw capacity, Reliance Power 6,000 mw, Hindustan Power Projects 10,000 mw and Sun Edison 15,000 mw.

SBI has said it will finance 15,000 mw renewable energy over the next five years. PM also called for collaboration between the 50 nations with abundant solar power to develop technological solutions. Stating that the role of energy in development was very important, he said, “We want to increase speed and at the same time scale new heights of development and one of the sectors is energy.” “We are focusing on renewable energy not for laurels but to lighten homes of the poor and bring a change in their lives,” he said. “We have ponds, can we think of solar panels on top of these ponds? We need to think of innovative ideas.”

He said the cost of electricity from solar photovoltaic cells has come down from Rs. 20 per unit to Rs. 7.50 and research and innovation can help bring it down further. Hybrid power generation involving solar and wind energy should be encouraged as it will help save on transmission and power evacuation infrastructure cost, he said.

Since then, private capitalists are the only ones with a structural interest in growing renewable energy, which makes support for renewables dependent on the profitability of those renewables — a profitability that is necessarily oppositional to the interests of ratepayers. In any case, despite governments push for renewable forced by activists and some concerned citizens, coal-fired power remains the main and easy sources of energy and revenue.

Private ownership and financing runs the risk of concentrating gains in private hands while leaving the public responsible for liabilities – ultimately undermining the goal of a publicly owned renewable energy and many other natural resource sectors. This is a classic playbook under Neo-liberalism: cause a crisis for the public sector in order to undermine trust, then solve an artificially created problem through the private market, resulting in higher profits for private firms at the expense of reliability and affordability for the country as a whole.

The fossil fuel industry’s stranglehold on both political and financial capital can be broken, but not without building a much stronger public sector. Organizers must be careful to guard against public-private partnerships that turn out to be a slow poison pill.