Practice Test 7

India's renewable energy sector has witnessed extraordinary growth over the past decade, driven by ambitious government targets, dramatically falling technology costs, improving financial frameworks, and growing national and global awareness of the urgent need to address climate change. The country has set a target of achieving five hundred gigawatts of installed renewable energy capacity by the year 2030, which if achieved would make India one of the world's largest producers of clean energy and a major contributor to global climate stabilisation. Solar power has been at the absolute forefront of this renewable energy transformation. The National Solar Mission, launched in 2010 as part of the National Action Plan on Climate Change, set the initial framework for solar deployment that has been progressively scaled up through subsequent policy revisions. The International Solar Alliance, co-founded by India and France at the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 and headquartered in Gurugram, brings together over one hundred member countries in a collaborative effort to promote solar energy deployment particularly in the tropical sun-belt region. India's installed solar capacity has grown from a negligible base of less than one gigawatt in 2010 to over eighty gigawatts in recent years, with ultra-mega solar parks in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh contributing substantially to this growth. The Bhadla Solar Park in Rajasthan is among the largest solar installations in the world, sprawling across thousands of hectares of desert land and producing power at some of the world's lowest tariff rates achieved through competitive auctions. Wind energy, harnessed particularly from coastal and high-altitude sites in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan, adds over forty gigawatts to India's renewable portfolio. The government's Production Linked Incentive scheme for solar photovoltaic modules aims to create a robust domestic manufacturing base and reduce India's dependence on imported components, particularly from China, which currently supplies a large proportion of the solar panels installed in the country. The National Green Hydrogen Mission, launched in 2023 with an outlay of nearly twenty thousand crore rupees, seeks to position India as a global leader in green hydrogen production, using renewable electricity to electrolyse water and produce hydrogen for use as a clean fuel in steel manufacturing, fertilizer production, heavy transportation, and other sectors that are difficult or expensive to electrify directly. The PM-KUSUM scheme promotes the installation of solar pumps and small-scale solar power plants by farmers, reducing agriculture's dependence on the conventional power grid and providing farmers with a supplementary income from electricity sales. The transition to clean energy is seen not only as an environmental and climate imperative but also as a strategic economic opportunity to reduce fossil fuel imports, create millions of new jobs in manufacturing, installation, operation, and maintenance, and establish India as a leading exporter of clean energy technology and services.