India: Share Of Non-Fossil Fuel Generation Tops 22% In 2018–2019

May 18th, 2019 by Mridul Chadha

The share of India’s non-fossil fuel power generation technology continues to grow with the rapid rise in solar and wind energy capacity over the last few years.

According to data released by India’s Central Electricity Authority and analyzed by CleanTechnica, the share of non-fossil fuel generation topped 22.2% in the financial year 2018-19 (April 2018 to March 2019). In India non-fossil fuel generation includes all renewable energy technologies, nuclear power, and large hydropower.

India classifies hydropower projects with installed capacity greater than 25 megawatts as conventional power plants and not as renewable energy projects. While the government did announce reclassification of large hydropower projects under the renewable energy category, the CEA is yet to report generation from these projects under the renewable energy tag.

Within the renewable energy technologies, wind continued to maintain a lead and represented 4.5% share in the total energy mix in 2018-19 while solar energy registered a share of 2.8%. The overall share of renewable energy technologies in the energy mix was 9.2%, up from 7.8% in 2017-18.

Renewable energy has never contributed more than 10% to the total energy mix in a calendar or financial year so far. The highest quarterly share it achieved was in Q3 2018 at 11.9%. On a monthly basis, as per CleanTechnica analysis, renewable energy technologies have breached the 10% share-mark four times, reaching an all-time high of 13.4% in August 2018.

It is interesting to note that while the share of wind energy in the total energy mix has increased from 2.7% in 2015-16 to 4.5% in 2018-19, its share within the renewable energy mix has remained almost unchanged at around 50%. The share of solar power in the total energy mix has increased from 0.6% to 2.8% while its share within the renewable energy mix has increased almost three times from 11.3% to 30.8%. The share of other renewable energy technologies within the renewable energy mix has halved from 39.7% in FY2015-16 to 20.2% in FY2018-19.











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