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.

“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.