BY 2022 India will be the most populated country in the world, so everything is on a large scale, and the use of energy is no exception.

Currently coal production is just over 600 million tonnes a year, third after China and the United State and until recently it looked as if it may stay this way, particularly with the imported Australian coal all being used to produce electricity.

However the decision has now been made to scrap the plans for 14 gigawatts of new coal fired power stations, the same as the whole UK total, as it’s clear that renewables, particularly solar, will be cheaper, and reduce the CO2 output.

A gigawatt is a billion watts, the amount needed to power 750,000 UK homes, and India now plans to increase the amount of solar power to 100 gigawatts by 2022, some 25 times more than the current production.

There will be no new coal mines after 2022 and already 37 mines are to be closed in the next six months. The aim is to produce at least 60 percent of its electricity using renewable technologies within the next ten years, and all open cast mines must plant trees on at least double their area, resulting already in an extra 73 million trees.

The Indian government is well aware of the quality of the air in the major cities and as well as moving away from the use of coal they now mandate that all buses and taxis must use compressed natural gas (CNG), high pressure methane, so reducing the amount of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide released.

Even so that’s not enough to clean the air and the ambition is to make all cars electric by 2030 cutting out the use of petrol and diesel completely.

You wouldn’t want to be a fossil fuel in India