
Kashish Shah
Kashish Shah is a Senior Research Analyst with Wood Mackenzie. Previously,
he worked as an Energy Finance Analyst with the Institute for Energy
Economics & Financial Analysis (IEEFA). He specialises in financing, policy
As of October 2021, Uttar Pradesh had total installed renewable capacity of 4.3GW, which is only 30% of its renewable capacity commissioning target of 14.1GW by 2022. By comparison, other states with high electricity demand are well ahead on their 2022 capacity commissioning targets.
Uttar Pradesh is now at a crossroads where the choices it makes about meeting future power demand growth could either speed up or slow down India's decarbonisation journey.
Meeting its 2030 solar target will allow UP to avoid locking in resources to build new coal plants beyond those under construction.
Uttar Pradesh (UP) has seen strong growth in power demand in the past decade and now accounts for a tenth of the country’s total power requirements. However, the state’s renewable energy (RE) capacity has grown at a snail’s pace and as a result, UP has fallen behind other large state electricity markets in terms of delivering on RE targets.
UP now needs to ramp up RE installations to not only meet its own RE targets but also to avoid holding back India’s performance on its targets of 175 gigawatts (GW) of RE capacity by 2022 and 500GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030.
The key findings of this report are:
Improving the financial and operational performances of UP’s distribution companies (Discoms) is the key to transforming UP’s electricity sector. Extraordinarily high AT&C losses of above 30% and high-power purchase costs continue to worsen the financial position of the Discoms.
In this report, we make a number of recommendations for improving the UP discoms’ financial situation: