India reveals its first climate change plan

In the wake of next week’s G8 meeting in Japan, India released its first action plan for climate change earlier this week.

The plan lacks a budget and plan of action at this point, but a Council on Climate Change, with stakeholders from the government, industry, and civil society, has been formed to come up with directives and funding.
Among the eight missions, the strongest focus seems to be on solar power.

“We will pool all our scientific, technical, and managerial talents, with financial sources to develop solar energy as a source of abundant energy to power our economy and to transform the lives of our people,” India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who chairs the council, said during the announcement of the plan.

“Our success in this endeavor will change the face of India,” he continued.

A goal is to increase photovoltaic production to 1 gigawatt per year (today the total installed world capacity is roughly 20 GW and almost doubling each year) as well as establish 1 GW of concentrating solar power, or CST, generation capacity by 2017. CST technologies include trough systems, dish/engine systems, and power towers that heat up water or molten salt that can then be used to run a generator to produce electricity.

And indeed, investments are piling up in the solar-tech industry in the country. In Fab City, a proposed semiconductor manufacturing hub outside of Hyderabad, solar cell companies are slowly taking over the grounds.

CNet