While India’s energy needs are rising rapidly, the supply is still heavily dependent on coal which accounted for nearly 79% of the total in 2023-2024, the Energy Statistics 2025 released on Saturday said.
Despite a boom in renewable-energy installations, coal production grew by 11.71% in 2023-24, reaching 997.83 million tonnes, up from 893.19 million tonne in the previous year, the report, released by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, showed.
“In the context of rapidly growing economies, especially in densely populated regions like Asia, there is an urgent need to shift towards cleaner energy sources,” the report said. “Coal has underpinned the expansion of electricity generation and industry, and remains the largest single fuel in the energy mix.”
According to official projections, India is likely to account for a quarter of the global energy demand in the next two decades.
To be sure, the share of the energy sector in emissions decreased from 59.74% in 2014 to 56.53% in 2020, the report added. In petroleum, high-speed diesel was the dominant product, accounting for 42% of total production, followed by petrol at 16%, the report showed.
The per capita energy consumption in the world’s fifth-largest economy jumped 23% in the last decade (from 22,434 mega joules/person in 2014-15 to 27,574 mj/person in 2023-24), pointing to higher demand. India is currently the world’s third-largest oil and LPG consumer, fourth largest LNG importer and the fourth largest refiner.
Renewable energy resources saw a growth of 11.15% during 2023-24 over 2022-23, the report showed, but they aren’t enough to meet the country’s increasing demand due to economic expansion, a growing population and extreme weather.
Installation of solar street lighting systems, home lighting systems and solar lanterns remained stable compared to the previous year, the report showed. Solar photovoltaic plants registered a growth rate of 19.61% over the previous year, indicating a positive increase in decentralised renewable energy solutions.
Frequent heat waves and cold snaps cause sudden spikes in power demand, increasing peak consumption and putting additional pressure on electricity reserves. “Estimating future demand accurately has become extremely important to prevent supply-demand mismatches and outages,” said Vivek Choudhuri, an engineer with the Central Electricity Authority.
The report said India had a “huge potential for generation of renewable energy”, which stood at 21,09,655 megawatts as on March 31 2024. In this, the potential from wind power is the largest at 11,63,856 megawatts, or 55%, followed by solar energy (7,48,990 megawatts) and large hydro (1,33,410). More than half of the clean-energy potential is concentrated in four states: Rajasthan (20.3%), Maharashtra (11.8%), Gujarat (10.5%) and Karnataka (9.8%).
India aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2070 and to meet 50% of its electricity requirements from renewable energy sources by 2030. Gross generation of electricity from the renewables has increased from 2,05,608 gigawatt-hour (GWH) in 2014-15 to 3,70,320 GWH during 2023-24, a compound growth rate of 6.76% over the decade.
The country has grown energy efficient over time, the data showed. Energy intensity (units of energy purchased for one unit of economic output or gross domestic product) declined from 0.2703 mega joules per rupee in 2014-15 to 0.2180 MJ per rupee in 2023-24. This decline indicates efficiency gains.
Power output clocked a compound annual growth rate of 5.01% in the last decade, the data showed but “the generation of electricity in India still depends heavily on coal”, the report states.
From a climate standpoint, the positive development is that rising costs of conventional power generation is likely to speed up the transition to clean energy, apart from India’s ambitious green-energy goals, said Sunil Dahiya of EnviroCatalysts, a clean energy advocacy organisation.