India's solar revolution

By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor

Two photographs by Saumya Khandelwal tell the story. In the first (above), two men are walking up a stony trail in the Himalayas with solar panels strapped to their backs; they’re headed for the village of Yal, which has no reliable electricity. In the second photograph (below), taken from a drone, row upon row of solar panels stretch to the horizon across a plain in Rajasthan. This is Bhadla Solar Park, which with a capacity of more than 2.2 gigawatts is the largest in the world.

At the COP26 conference in Glasgow last week, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India committed his country to net-zero carbon emissions by 2070, opinion was divided as to whether this was a big step forward or just more of what Greta Thunberg has denounced as “blah blah blah.” But there was less disagreement about a more immediate pledge Modi made—to quadruple India’s renewable energy capacity by 2030, to 500 gigawatts. By all accounts that’s ambitious.

As Khandelwal and National Geographic contributing writer Yudhijit Bhattacharjee report for us this week, the 42 large solar parks that India has built over the past decade are only one part of the country’s vigorous embrace of solar energy. The other part is encapsulated by a 32-year-old woman named Rukmini Katara, whom Bhattacharjee met in a small town in Rajasthan.

A former village grocer, Katara is now the CEO of Durga Energy, a company that employs 40 women to manufacture solar panels. They’ve made 300,000 in the last four years and installed them in surrounding villages. A hundred watts of solar is enough to transform life in a rural Indian household. And Durga Energy’s transformational potential goes beyond that, beyond even its empowering effect on the women it employs.

“When solar panels are produced locally, people will buy locally and money will circulate within the local economy,” Chetan Solanki explained to Bhattacharjee. Solanki, a solar energy expert at the Indian Institute of Technology, helped found Durga Energy, and now hopes to see it replicated in other parts of the country.
India still gets 70 percent of its electricity from coal, and that’s going to be hard to change. The Indian economy is growing rapidly, as it needs to, and the planet is getting hotter. By 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, India could be consuming as much electricity just for air conditioning as the total it consumes today.

So maybe Modi’s speech, like others at COP26, included some blah blah blah. Maybe a certain amount of blah blah blah is even required at a conference intended to herd 195 cats/countries further down the road away from fossil fuels.

But on the ground, in India and elsewhere, real change is happening. In the U.S., renewables account for more than four-fifths of new generating capacity this year. The average American consumer’s carbon emissions are down more than a fifth since 2000. Is the change happening fast enough? Not yet. Will it eventually? I wish I could ask people living in 2070.

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We asked, you answered: Should government intervene to seek to slow climate change? Do you believe weather extremes and natural disasters have increased because of climate change? As world leaders work through broad climate issues in Glasgow, most of 2,200 Americans polled by Nat Geo and Morning Consult agree strongly with both questions (pictured above)—and 3 of 4 agree with scientists that climate change is happening. Most readers writing in after we asked these questions in last week’s newsletter are, if anything, more emphatic. “We need leaders who can help people see we are part of an ecosystem no matter what country we live in and that taking care of that system is what’s important,” writes Karen Brown. Government, writes John Ozmun, “is the only entity with scale to effectively communicate the issue and marshal the resources and incentives that will be required to drive actions to slow climate change.”

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