BENGALURU: Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan said on Monday that India was on course to generate 175 GW of clean energy by 2022, as promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“Our Prime Minister has said that by 2022 we want to have at least 175 GW of clean energy production in the country, out of which 100 GW would be through solar and the rest through other sources,” he said while inaugurating the National Interdisciplinary Centre for Energy Research (NICER) and the National Clean Coal Research and Development Centre (NCCRDC) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. “We are making good progress. In fact, we are leading from the front,” he said. The country has set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emission by 33-35 per cent, to combat climate change and global warming. So far, the country has been able to reduce it to 21 per cent, Harsh Vardhan said.
NCCRD has been established at IISc with a funding of Rs 37 crore, where researchers will work on major combustion applications such as automotive, thermal aerospace and fire research.
The objective of the project is to address several critical R&D challenges towards the development of clean coal technologies, in tandem with developing supercritical power plant technologies. The pathways identified for lowering the carbon footprint of coal-based thermal power plants is by shifting towards high efficiency, advanced ultra-supercritical steam power plants as well as supercritical carbon dioxide -based Brayton cycle power plants.
“The breakthrough research being pursued here in clean coal domain could potentially be a game-changer for meeting the energy needs of the country, in terms of higher efficiency and capacity at lower operating costs and size,” he said.