India received $500 million in funding for solar panels to ratify the United Nations’ Paris agreement on global warming, according to an anonymous lender who spoke to United Press International (UPI).
India’s new cash infusion came from the Asian Development Bank, but it wasn’t exactly unexpected. Under the terms of the agreement, wealthier nations like America are expected to help finance the development of solar power in poor developing nations like India.
India increased solar subsidies by a factor of eight last year, raising the amount spent from $92 million to $770 million annually. India has a long history of raking in cash from Western governments and banks to fianance its solar spending. The country got a series of loans worth $1.5 billion in January from international financial institutions for rooftop solar power. In January, The World Bank granted India another $750 million in rooftop solar loans. Before either of these, India already received substantial assistance from Western countries, equivalent to $2.5 trillion over the next 15 years in direct aid, grants, and cheap financing for green energy.
Despite these vast investments, India gets a mere 2 percent of its electricity from solar panels, while coal plants provide 67 percent of the nation’s power. India is currently building 87,122 megawatts of coal power capacity. As a result, in 2014 Indian carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy use increased by 8.1 percent, making it the world’s fastest-growing producer of CO2. India and the rest of the developing world are projected to produce 68 percent of future CO2 emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
India’s government is also currently wasting huge amounts of solar power because the panels are too expensive to operate, according to a letter from the country’s green energy ministry. The waste is caused due to the inherently inefficient nature of solar power, which doesn’t coincide with times of day when power is most needed. This poses an enormous safety challenge to grid operators and makes power grids vastly more fragile.
