India has crossed 220 gigawatts of installed renewable capacity, hit its Paris climate targets five years early, and is now the third-largest renewable energy producer on Earth – yet non-fossil sources still supply only a quarter of its actual electricity generation. Simultaneously, it has over 92 gigawatts of new coal capacity in its pipeline and has advised utilities not to retire a single coal plant before 2030. This is not a transition. Not yet. It is a nation building renewables on top of coal, and telling the world – and itself – that the two are compatible.
India has crossed 220 gigawatts of installed renewable capacity, hit its Paris climate targets five years early, and is now the third-largest renewable energy producer on Earth—yet non-fossil sources still supply only a quarter of its actual electricity generation. Simultaneously, it has over 92 gigawatts of new coal capacity in its pipeline and has advised utilities not to retire a single coal plant before 2030. This is not a transition. Not yet. It is a nation building renewables on top of coal, and telling the world—and itself—that the two are compatible.
I came to Delhi expecting to talk about climate change. What I found instead was a conversation about independence. Every session I attended kept returning to the same question—not how does India save the planet, but how does India stop depending on everyone else to power itself. That reframe is powerful. But after eight days here, I want to push back on this.
The energy sovereignty argument is legitimate. India currently imports nearly 90% of the oil it consumes. Before the Ukraine war, Russia supplied around 2% of that. Today it supplies roughly a third—a dependency that sits awkwardly against India’s foundational doctrine of Atmanirbharta, or self-reliance. At Raisina Dialogue 2026, Erik Solheim, former Minister of Climate and the Environment for Norway, put the case simply: the sun is Indian, the wind is Indian, the great rivers of India are Indian. He pointed to a 7-gigawatt combined solar, wind, and pumped storage facility built by Greenko in Pinnapuram, Andhra Pradesh—nothing equivalent exists in Europe or America, only in China—as proof of what India can do at scale. And he quoted Gautam Adani directly: in Gujarat, solar with battery storage is now cheaper than coal. Economics, he argued, will do what decades of climate diplomacy could not.
That optimism has a shadow, however. China manufactures around 90% of the world’s solar panels and 70% of its batteries. As Solheim acknowledged at Raisina, any nation going green without Chinese supply chains will do so more slowly and at greater cost. India’s renewable buildout has itself relied heavily on Chinese solar imports—the installation jobs are Indian, but the core technology is not. India’s ambition under Make in India is to manufacture panels and turbines at scale for domestic use and global export. That is strategically sound. But it means India is simultaneously trying to compete with China in green manufacturing while depending on China to build its own green transition—a tension rarely acknowledged in the celebratory narratives around India’s renewable growth.
The coal data makes the picture harder still. Analysis shows India recorded a record 38.4 gigawatts of new coal plant proposals in 2024 alone, with total proposed capacity exceeding 92 gigawatts by mid-2025. The government has instructed utilities not to retire any thermal plants before 2030. Coal production hit one billion tonnes in FY2024-25—a record. India and China together accounted for 87% of new coal power commissioned globally in the first half of 2025. India is not transitioning away from coal. It is building renewables on top of coal, and there is a meaningful difference between those two things.
None of this diminishes the Viksit Bharat vision—a fully developed India by the centenary of independence in 2047, with 90% of the energy grid from green sources and a green economy the Council on Energy, Environment and Water estimates could generate 48 million jobs and attract $4.1 trillion in investment. That vision is serious.
But the structural apparatus to deliver it—grid storage, distribution reform, concessional financing, and a credible coal retirement schedule—does not yet exist at the scale the target demands. With the United States absent from global climate leadership and Europe too politically fragmented to lead, the burden falls on India and China. Their rivalry in green technology may ultimately do more for the planet than any diplomatic accord. But that only works if India accelerates. Capacity is not generation. Targets are not trajectories. India has everything it needs to become the green superpower the world requires. What it needs now is the political courage to match its ambition with the decisions that ambition actually demands.