Annual climate talks are a time for big announcements – new targets, new investments and partnerships. Politicians will often declare a new goal in the run-up to the conference, to show leadership or reassure others that they’re doing their part in the giant ‘I will if you will’ of global environmental diplomacy. What happens to those targets afterwards is less public. Sometimes that’s because they weren’t genuine in the first place. Sometimes it’s because they fizzle out or are overtaken by events. Even if goals are met, we might not hear about it. The quiet deployment of a technology or the gradual fall of a statistic – these are not newsworthy things.
It’s important to notice progress, otherwise it makes people cynical and erodes support for climate action. Ten years on from the Paris Agreement, it’s worth looking around and seeing who did what they said they would, and one of my favourite such stories is from India.
In 2014 India announced that it would build 100 Gigawatts of solar power. This was no small thing to declare – the whole world put together had 181 GW at the time. We’re talking about building over half the world’s current capacity in one country, in one decade. Solar wasn’t cheap in 2014 and India wasn’t rich, so this was a major commitment. But it’s done – India crossed the 100 GW line in early 2025.
It took a lot to get there, starting with financing of it, and major improvements to the grid. The big commitment sent a clear signal that India was a growth market for solar, and that brought investment in manufacturing. India makes a lot of its panels locally, with production capacity rising from 2 GW a year in 2014 to 60 today. This unlocked economies of scale and brought prices down. As solar became cheaper, access to it widened from big solar farms to an expansion in rooftop arrays. This time last year the Indian government announced a major subsidy programme for home solar that aims to put panels on 10 million homes.
The original goal was to reach 100 Gigawatts by 2022. That was set back to 2025 because of the pandemic, which I wouldn’t hold against anyone. With that caveat, the goal has been met, and India is in a different place today than it was. It is now a significant force in global solar power, with a dynamic solar sector that is developing solutions for local markets and for export. It has expertise and supply chains to keep on adding solar power at ever lower prices, broadening access and aiming higher still. The new target is to have 500GW of non-fossil fuel energy capacity by 2030.
Announcing the target made headlines. Quietly getting on with the work usually gets less attention. What other climate stories are we missing, where countries are delivering on what they planned?
- Photo by Santanu Sen/Flickr
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