India plans $100bn of renewables investment by 2020.

FT: “India will need $250bn of investment in power generation and transmission over the next five years to meet its goal of doubling electricity output and connecting everyone to the grid, according to the new government.”
“Piyush Goyal, minister for power, coal and renewable energy, said $100bn of the new investment would be in renewables and $50bn in transmission, with the rest in other areas.
But he poured cold water on the prospects of expanding the country’s nuclear power production. While it had potential, he said, the government needed to know the life-cycle cost of nuclear plants and did not want old technology discarded by European countries abandoning their nuclear power stations.
….The Bharatiya Janata party government of Narendra Modi, prime minister, has plans to develop Indian infrastructure and has vowed to provide 24-hour electricity to all 1.3bn citizens by the end of its term of office in 2019.
“We can see a situation where we will have power for all businesses, all homes, all offices right through the length and breadth of India,” Mr Goyal said.
At present, 53m homes are not connected to the grid and many businesses rely on costly diesel generators to produce electricity during lengthy power cuts. In the summer of 2012, the grid in northern India collapsed, leaving hundreds of millions of Indians without electricity for up to three days in the worst outage in history.
Mr Goyal said electricity output would be increased partly by improving the mix of power sources, including renewables such as wind and solar, and partly by doubling state-run Coal India’s mine output to 1bn tonnes a year in the next five years to provide fuel for so-called “stranded assets” – big new thermal plants starved of coal.
India’s renewable targets are particularly ambitious. Some business leaders in the private sector doubt that India – which has 2.9 gigawatts of solar electricity capacity and planned under the previous government to raise that to 20GW by 2022 – will be able to achieve the new solar target of 100GW within the next eight years.”