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The Supreme Court has recently asked the Union Ministry of Power to convene an urgent meeting with the country’s top energy regulators—the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) and the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC)—to prepare an action plan for slashing greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector. The court’s directive came in response to a petition by Ridhima Pandey, a 17-year-old climate activist from Uttarakhand, who urged the judiciary to take action against climate change through stricter measures. Acknowledging that climate change has ascended as one of the most existential global predicaments, wielding profound ramifications beyond mere environmental degradation, escalating temperatures, erratic weather patterns, the court stated: “it is compelling for individuals and institutions to converge and adopt a coordinated effort to effecting deal with the emerging situations. We now propose to consider the impact of power generation and the consequential carbon emissions on climate change.” The court had asked the ministry and the electricity regulatory bodies to submit the action plan by August 19. While the authorities have sought more time to formulate a decarbonisation plan, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a research and advocacy organisation in Delhi, has prepared a roadmap that may offer valuable guidance.
The report, titled “Decarbonizing the coal-based thermal power sector in India”, analyses the current and future emissions from coal-based power plants, which are largely responsible for power sector emissions, and identifies significant opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from these plants. The report states that decarbonising the thermal power sector in India could lead to a reduction of over 30 per cent in GHG emissions by 2031-32. This is more than the combined emissions from two other hard-to-abate sectors: iron and steel, and cement.
Coal-based thermal power plants—where coal is burned in a boiler to create high-temperature, high-pressure steam that spins a turbine to generate electricity—are, without a doubt, the single largest source of energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions globally. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), coal still supplies a third of the global electricity generation, with China, the US and India being the major consumers. In India, coal has been the workhorse of the power sector since the commissioning of the first power plant, the Hussain Sagar Thermal Power Station in Hyderabad, in 1920. The Union Ministry of Coal refers to coal as the “most important and abundant fossil fuel in India”. Coal is also critical to India’s energy security. Today, 223 gigawatts (GW) of grid-connected coal-and lignite-fired power stations supply about three-quarters of the country’s total electricity demand.
Even though India has made a robust progress in the renewable energy sector in recent years—achieving 50 per cent cumulative installed electric power capacity from non-fossil fuel sources by July 2025, five years ahead of the target—the generation and supply of electricity from renewable sources remains intermittent and limited. In 2024-25, the share of electricity from solar and wind energy was less than 12 per cent of the overall electricity mix. In this scenario, India’s growing economy is likely to continue fuelling demand for coal. The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) publishes demand forecasting, which indicates that India’s electricity dem-and will nearly double between 2021-22 and 2031-32, reaching 2.4 billion units.
In fact, since the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, India’s electricity demand has consistently exceeded the projections made by CEA in its National Electricity Plans (NEPs). Over the past three years, the government has revised its thermal power capacity addition targets at least three times due to growing electricity demand. The CEA’S NEP 2022-32 report, released in 2023, states that in a high-demand scenario, India’s projected installed thermal capacity by 2031-32, would be 262.6 GW. In August 2024, Minister of State for Power Shripad Naik informed the Rajya Sabha that the “required coal and lignite based installed capacity would be 283 GW” to meet the country’s base load requirement by 2032. Hence the government proposes to add a minimum of 80 GW coal-based capacity by 2032, the minister said. Then in August 2025, the Union Ministry of Power informed the Rajya Sabha that the government had further revised its target, aiming to add 97 GW of coal- and lignite-based installed capacity by 2035. With this, India’s coal-fired power capacity is projected to reach 307 GW by 2035.
CEA in its NEP 2022-32 report estimates that the projected addition of 262 GW thermal capacity would result in 1,100 million tonnes of CO2 emissions from the power sector in 2031-32. This figure underscores the potential volume of emissions with a projected capacity of 307 GW. However, this also presents an opportunity. Since electricity generation accounts for 39 per cent of India’s total emissions, as per India’s Third National Communication to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2023, any reduction in emission from this sector could significantly contribute to lowering India’s overall GHG emissions.
This article is part of the cover story Need not be a dirty affair originally published in the September 1-15, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth