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Remarks by Dr. Rajiv J. Shah at the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet’s Event: “Deliberations on India’s Pathway to 500 GW Renewable Energy Access”

Dr. Rajiv J. Shah speaks at the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet event on India’s path to 500 GW renewable energy, January 7, 2025, New Delhi. Photo courtesy of The Rockefeller Foundation.

As delivered on Tuesday, January 7, 2025, in New Delhi, India

Hello, everyone. Welcome.

I want to thank Vish [Vaishali Mishra] and Saurabh [Kumar] for hosting this session. I certainly want to thank Woochong [Um] for taking on the role of our global CEO for the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet. And Dr. Ajay Mathur, we appreciate your being here, and I enjoyed hearing your remarks.

I’m certainly excited to be here today, because just yesterday, I saw what tomorrow could look like in parts of India and for the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet overall.

That future is growing on the farmland of Mr. Nirmal Das Swami in Rajasthan. For years, Nirmal grew wheat on his nine hectares of land. Then just last year, he took advantage of a new government scheme to build a solar park on one of those hectares. Now, Nirmal is harvesting the power of the sun, just one megawatt of electricity, to boost his crop yield and his income and his entire community’s access to productive power.

With affordable, reliable, renewable electricity from Nirmal’s farm, Salim, the owner of a nearby welding business, has doubled the hours his team can work. Salim has also doubled his revenue. He proudly told us he’s gone from making 3,500 rupees a month to 8,000 rupees a month, and now plans to hire 6 new workers.

With that same affordable, reliable, renewable electricity, Firoz, the owner of a flour mill, has doubled his output from 500 kilograms per night — and he was only working in the middle of the night — to more than 1,000 kilograms now that daytime power is reliable. Firoz is now doubling the number of people he employs.

And with that same affordable, reliable, renewable electricity, Gita, Anju, Ghisi, and many other women farmers no longer have to wake up in the middle of the night, the only time grid power was previously available, to irrigate their crops. Gita, Anju, and Ghisi are now working during the day, bettering both their own lives and using their time in more productive ways.

What’s happening in Rajasthan is the difference between basic energy access and true energy abundance. For years, Nirmal’s community was connected to the grid, but the power was simply not good enough for a good life. It was too unpredictable, too inconsistent, and it often only turned on, especially for farmers, in the middle of the night.

Now, there is enough power to work and study all day, to plan, to invest, to build, and to dream bigger. Rajasthan is proof that changing energy changes lives, especially in rural India.

For more than 100 years, The Rockefeller Foundation has been dedicated to development in the rural areas of India, where most Indians still live. That work has evolved as the needs of India’s rural population evolved.

At first, health was the primary concern, and our focus was on combating and eradicating disease. Then, it was malnutrition and hunger. So, we helped support the Green Revolution, which improved hundreds of millions of lives through agricultural productivity gains.

Now, in today’s digital economy, nothing holds people back more than insufficient access to electricity. That’s why studies have made clear across the globe that access to electricity is the most effective way to reduce multi-dimensional poverty.

Still, today, two-thirds of Indians still live in rural areas. [Around] two-thirds of them are considered energy poor, not because they don’t have access to some form of electricity at some time, but because they lack access to sufficient, reliable, always-on electricity that allows them to use modern tools and services. As a result, hundreds of millions of people are still being left behind, unable to participate fully in the tremendous economic transformation underway in the rest of India.

That’s why, for the last decade, The Rockefeller Foundation has been focused on increasing access to reliable, affordable electricity in India and everywhere else around the emerging world.

Most of that work today is done through our partner, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, of which we and our colleagues from the IKEA Foundation are both members. GEAPP was launched [at COP 26] in Glasgow around a simple idea: that unless the global energy transition was just — unless it genuinely afforded meaningful opportunity for everyone, including those who live in rural communities — it would fail.

After beginning with small mini-grids designed to support basic lighting and small economic activity, often in very low-income communities in rural Bihar, GEAPP is now helping accelerate India’s big bet to make the energy transition more just by deploying 500 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030.

Today, GEAPP has just released a three-part strategy to help deploy 10 gigawatts of renewable energy in 10 states to change the lives and opportunities of more than 300 million people who we estimate are energy poor in rural Indian communities.

With this strategy, and with your partnership, what’s happening in Rajasthan does not just need to be the future of one community. It can be the future of other states. It can be the future for all of India. And by proving what’s possible with this new technology applied in this novel way, it can be the future for the rest of the world, too.

The first part of GEAPP’s strategy is to help bring distributed renewable energy to communities where the grid does not reach or, more commonly here, only reaches people intermittently.

For years, people largely assumed that meaningful applications of renewable energy had to happen at a very large scale — that the energy transition is entirely about gigawatt-scale solar plants. Those massive projects have an important place, servicing industry at a time when electricity demand is booming and far exceeding previous estimates.

But India’s economy is not one size fits all, so our strategy cannot be, either. Kilowatt- and megawatt-scale projects have proven uniquely capable of expanding productive use in rural India, changing lives for farmers, for women, for children, and for others, especially those that run small enterprises.

Let’s start with farms.

Almost half of India’s population is still dependent on agriculture. Close to 95 percent of India’s irrigated areas are dependent on pumps that are either grid connected, which often means nighttime power and losses for utilities, or run using diesel, which is costly for farmers and certainly for the environment.

Thanks to the PM Kusum subsidy scheme, repurposing land for solar plants is making life better and more profitable for farmers, as we saw yesterday in Rajasthan.

GEAPP is helping to accelerate the deployment and impact of PM Kusum by providing critical technical support to these plants and the farmers who own them. These plants allow farmers to irrigate more efficiently in the daylight and diversify into cash crops. And these plants allow some of those farmers to become solar entrepreneurs, selling excess power to the utility or increased local supply. GEAPP is already supporting 59 solar plants in Rajasthan, providing 108 megawatts in support of 30,000 farm households and enhancing 64,000 jobs.

This is not the only way to bolster productive use in rural settings. We can also do more to focus on women-led non-farm enterprises, as we are starting to do Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere in India.

The second part of GEAPP’s strategy is designed to help ensure India’s grid can, as a whole, absorb 500 gigawatts of renewable generation.

To add solar, wind, and other intermittent power sources, and to effectively manage peak demand, requires meaningful energy storage. In fact, the Government of India estimates it must deploy 47 gigawatts of battery energy storage systems, or BESS, by 2032, to ensure it can handle the new energy generated.

Last [May], the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission approved India’s first commercial stand-alone BESS project. That project is a partnership between GEAPP, IndiGrid, and BSES Rajdhani Power Limited. GEAPP provided a concessional loan for 70 percent of the total project cost.

As a result, the new installation is expected to be online early this year, which would make it the fastest implemented BESS project in India to date. It will provide 24/7 power for over 12,000 low-income customers at an annual tariff rate 55 percent lower than the previous benchmark, which would set a new precedent for BESS energy affordability.

This project is part of GEAPP’s larger effort to secure one gigawatt of new BESS commitments in India by 2026.

The third and final part of GEAPP’s strategy is to help modernize India’s utilities so they can really serve everyone, especially in rural settings.

Expanding energy production could accelerate inequality unless utilities expand their capacity for planning and management so that they can effectively and efficiently reach and service everyone.

As is true in many emerging markets, India’s DISCOMs, especially in rural and semi-urban areas, experience a raft of operational challenges because the data they have about their grids are outdated, inconsistent, and insufficiently detailed. This makes it difficult to analyze and plan. In fact, many processes are still manual, making them time consuming and prone to error. Real-time monitoring is limited, so DISCOMs can’t proactively identify and resolve issues. And as states add renewable energy to the mix, including distributed renewable electrification, it stresses the grid’s capacity even further.

The GEAPP India team is implementing a project that will leverage artificial intelligence to demonstrate the benefits of advanced network modeling in Rajasthan. It involves grid digitization, real-time load flow studies, and predictive grid simulation to assess network health performance and future asset investment needs. If successful, this digital twin program will be expanded across all DISCOMs in Rajasthan by 2025 and, I hope, deployed in at least 10 other states by 2030.

These three parts of GEAPP’s strategy are meant to accelerate one of the world’s biggest single bets: that India can have a just and timely energy transition.

Changing energy can change Indian lives. And by proving what’s possible, India and GEAPP’s model can change the lives of hundreds of millions of people in Africa and elsewhere around the world.

In fact, the world is watching.

In just three weeks, more than 30 heads of state will come together in Tanzania to look at India’s example and make similar commitments to improving the lives of 300 million people who are under-electrified in 15 core countries across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Ten states, 10 gigawatts, 300 million people [here in India].

We can succeed if we work together on the steps this strategy will require — public, private, and philanthropic [partners collaborating].

Together, we can ensure the future that some of us got to experience yesterday — a future of affordable, reliable, renewable electricity that powers growth and opportunity — is, in fact, accessible to everyone.

We look forward to working with you to build that future. Thank you.