US hails PM Modi's 'enormously impressive' renewable pledge

Paris, Dec 3: The US on Dec 2 said that the ambitious renewable programme including scaling up solar and wind energy pledged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is "enormously impressive" and it will work with Indian partners to provide assistance in realising their goals.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made pledges which are enormously impressive with respect to the development of renewable energy, solar wind and renewable beyond that. The total that he has pledged is 175 GW by 2022 which is an enormous pledge," US Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern said.

"We provide assistance to India, we invest in India. Many other countries do. We certainly want to work with Indian partners to encourage in exactly what they are trying to do and do our best to help them realise that," he said.

India has announced an ambitious targets to install 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022. In its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) or climate action plan which most of the countries have pledged, India has announced it aims at achieving around 40 per cent cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030.

The US said that Modi also during his bilateral meeting with President Barack Obama had suggested that developed countries should help developing countries with capacity building to undertake the requisite monitoring and reporting of climate actions that countries had pledged.

"We don't think anyone should be asked to do what they can't do but on the other hand, we need to be moving in ramping up and moving in a positive direction and with the kind of capacity building support that countries need in order to do the right kind of inventories, to do the right sort of reporting."

"We are actually putting forward a proposal in that vein. And interesting, what I thought was a very good and very interesting bilateral meeting between President Obama and PM Modi, the Prime Minister actually suggested exactly this kind of thing...a capacity building effort to help developing countries to do exactly the kind of reporting."

"And we explained that we have actually been working on exactly such kind of a proposal. I hope we can work with the Indians on that," Stern said.

PTI