Renewable energy will play an increasing role in India, as it will everywhere. Because of its latitude India should be able to harvest a lot of solar energy. Biofuels may not play as large a role in India as they do in, for instance, Brazil, because of the fragmented structure of the farm sector in India. Biofuels need scale to be competitive.
Solar has many advantages, being a distributed source that doesn’t have to rely on India’s feeble grid.
Village-scale projects, such as methane for cooking from manure, can make a substantial impact of quality of life. There are many new technologies and business models in this area.

There are a number of sources of renewable energy to choose from:
1) Hydro power – the best sites in India are already in use, so there is only small scale hydro available – run of the river hydro is cheap to build and works fairly well. It is a technology that some people in India are already using. May add up to 1% to the total available power
2) Thermal solar – hot water – cooking with reflectors – some people are already doing this in India it is a low cost way of improving life. This is probably the way that renewable energy will grow the fastest
3) Photovoltaic Solar – expensive, limited global production – limited seasons in much of India when it will work – probably the slowest growing solution for India, but the most visible
4) Wind – there are a number of locations with enough wind to make wind farms very useful – there is a global limit to the production of utility scale windmills – right now the backlog is more that 3 years for existing orders.
5) Wind – small scale – there are even more places that have enough wind to use small scale wind production, unfortunately the grid is not ready for them, so they will be stand alone sources of power.
6) Wave action – not in the next 5 years, maybe in 10, this technology needs lots of R&D to make it survive in the Ocean and be productive.
7) Biofuels – India does not have the farmland to make corn or sugar based fuels economic (food has to come first) – so that means that wood based fuels and waste based fuels will have to be the main sources for bio fuels – this means much development, if it is to be done on a commercial scale, since the developed world is focused on sugar and corn based fuels. Same small scale will happen with recycle vegetable oils, but that will only be a “drop in the bucket”.
Bio Gases – there are a number of sources for methane in India, dumps, farms and other locations – bio gases are easy to tap and cheap to use, but the quality of the gas is very uneven, so there will need to be processing or people will have to learn to live with good gas and then poor gas in the system (meaning that cooking will take more or less time).
9) Bio Hydrogen – the fuel cells and other consumers of bio hydrogen are not ready for production and probably will not be until 2020. The bacteria to produce it are still in the lab.
10) People power – there is a lot of energy from the activities of people that are capturable and we do not do so today – so there is some ability to do so in the future.

Now with that said in 5 to 10 years, I see little progress in renewable energy in India (or the rest of the world). R&D money is still not available, factories have to re-tool, regulations need to change, and people are not ready to accept the costs or the changes in their lives that it will take.
That said, India will continue to move ahead on wind and thermal solar projects and do well with them, but in 5 to 10 years they will not make a significant change in the fuel mix in India nor will they offset the growth in demand for energy (e.g. more fossil fuel will be used in India in 2017 than today).
We should not hold back on deploying what we can – but we need to realize that most of the technologies are not ready for production.

The opportunity is there, both capacity and cost factors would come into play. Currently the key sectors would be wind solar and ethanol. India has a number of challenges and strengths that work in its advantage. India loves technology and the people there are very smart. There is an opportunity to leap frog the established western economies when it comes to the use of energy and technology. The US and Europe have established and entrenched infrastructure and these create barriers to entry and to adoption of new technology. India has a unique opportunity to introduce new technology that is energy efficient and would be welcomed by its people. An example would be solar powered lighting to replace kerosene lighting that exists in post communities. Other examples would be to introduce low energy usage devises immediately and not step through the technology ladder the US and Europe have gone through.
This of course requires visionary leadership that would understand the trade offs between the avoidance of the cost of a power plant and the possible subsidizing of solar power or other low energy option.

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