Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her interim budget presentation on Thursday, announced schemes and upcoming policies for various sources of power generation. The mix of announcements had almost equal attention to renewable and non-renewable sources as the country continues to witness increased demand for power while staying on track with its global green goals.
Further to the Prime Minister's announcement last month of the solar scheme—the Pradhanmantri Suryoday Yojana—the finance minister announced that this would benefit 1 crore households as they could avail 300 units of electricity for free and save between ₹15,000 and ₹18,000 per month.
Apart from solar, a push for wind energy generation came in the way of a viability gap funding for an offshore capacity of 1GW. While renewables have been the focus of the government, this is the second VGF in six months towards renewable sources after a subsidy of ₹3,750 crore was announced for Battery Energy Storage Solutions (BESS) in September last year.
The finance minister, in her budget speech, also spoke about coal gasification and liquification capacity. She said, "100-tonne coal gasification capacity will be set up by 2030."
This comes after the Cabinet last week approved the scheme for the promotion of coal and lignite gasification projects of government PSUs and the private sector with an outlay of ₹8,500 crore towards incentives for coal gasification projects under three categories.
(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)
First Published: Feb 1, 2024 1:05 PM IST
