Read my lips: Indian energy minister repeats “no coal imports within 3 years”

India’s energy minister Piyush Goyal has repeated the message that thermal coal developers in Australia, and state and federal governments, do not want to hear: India intends to halt all imports of thermal coal within two or three years.

“Indian companies used to import a lot of thermal coal. We want to completely stop its import over the next two to three years,” Goyal told the Maritime India summit in Mumbai last Friday.

“We have already reduced imports by Rs 28,000 crore. We will save Rs 40,000 crore.” A “crore” relates to a unit of 10 million. So 40,000 crore is equivalent to $A8 billion.

 This is not the first time that Goyal has made such a statement. And more recently he has added to this by saying that solar energy is now cheaper than new coal generation.
Meanwhile, Indian imports have fallen dramatically, the biggest coal company has slashed the price of domestic coal, and the country has stated its intention to ban sales of petrol cars by 2030,

Goyal also re-iterated that India intends to fast track its development of solar, which aims to have 100GW of solar by 2022.

“The previous government had set a target of 20,000 MW of solar capacity by 2022. But we want to achieve this target by 2017. We have set an ambitious target of achieving 100,000 MW of solar capacity by 2022,” Goyal said.

Still, amid all this, the Australian Coalition government and the Queensland state Labor government continue to argue that new projects like the giant Carmichael project are a good idea.

Coalition MP Ewan Jones even argued on Monday that the government should use climate funds to support the construction of a 1.2GW coal generator that could, amongst other things, help provide power for the coal mine.

 

Comments

12 responses to “Read my lips: Indian energy minister repeats “no coal imports within 3 years””

  1. howardpatr Avatar
    howardpatr

    Comment on this issue was sought Prime Minister Cayman Turnbull but the request was referred the Prime Minister in waiting Mad Monk Abbott.

    1. john Avatar
      john

      Can you imagine the comment from the Mad Monk?
      I shudder to think.

    2. Chris Fraser Avatar
      Chris Fraser

      It was Mad Monk’s turn to wear the LNP clothing pool hard hat anyway. Hope the last person to wear it had nits.

  2. lin Avatar
    lin

    just because nobody will buy it is no reason to stop massive government and taxpayer subsidies to coal mining, surely!

    1. Chris Fraser Avatar
      Chris Fraser

      Imagine all that arable land and those water aquifers getting wrecked for all time, for something nobody wants at any price ? Sounds innovative.

      1. Suburbable Avatar
        Suburbable

        Maybe repairing the damage will add to our GDP.

  3. Chris Fraser Avatar
    Chris Fraser

    It’s pretty funny that some people in Australia only hear what they want to …

    1. john Avatar
      john

      You do know they have deaf ears

  4. john Avatar
    john

    The situation is that coal from Australia is not going to be able to compete because it is too expensive.
    The cost of spending money to import is undermining the Indian balance of payments.
    Besides of which importing coal that delivers a price above the price some of India can afford is just not going to work on any level.
    Yes perhaps the existing provider of power may or may not be a very good deliverer of power against emissions however get back to the bottom line.
    As i see it please implement as much RE as possible especially in those areas where the users are not able to pay the price or power from the present utility’s.
    Put in distribute RE and back it up with battery to supply a small demand to the end users is this so hard to implement?

  5. Brunel Avatar
    Brunel

    Typo. Hear rather than here.

  6. Phil Avatar
    Phil

    Perhaps some serious money spent of Marketing Coal might save the status Quo ?

    Marketing people can make anything sexy and desirable.

  7. arne-nl Avatar

    “which aims to have 100MW of solar by 2022.”

    I hope that is a typo and 100 GW is the real target.

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