As the world's fourth largest energy consumer, India has far from a low energy consumption. Their economy is also quite large, the tenth largest in terms of US dollars. When looking at real GDP and purchasing power India is has the third largest economy. Despite the current large size of their economy, it continues to grow, and has grown substantially over the past couple decades. Over the past 15 years their real GDP has grown at a rate of 7% annually, and continues to grow.
While a growing economy is generally a good thing, it means an increase in consumption of goods, resources, and especially energy. India has struggled in the past to provide adequate energy resources, relying heavily on foreign imports. Despite having the World's fifth-largest coal reserves, of which this resource is their primary source of energy, their is still a shortage of energy. The energy consumption per capita in India is substantially lower than that of developed countries, but because of the very large population in India the lower per capita energy consumption helps the problem of energy minimally. As the county's economy grows, and their energy consumption with it, it will be a challenge for the country to provide and afford an adequate supply of energy.
It is good to see that developing country's economies are growing. India is one of the developing countries whose presence has become quite noticeable in the world economy in the past several years. It will be interesting to see how the country solves the issue of energy consumption.
India is certainly on the rise in the past couple of years, but with this problem that is arousing, it may hurt their economy. It's going to be tough to lower their energy consumption as their population continues to keep growing. They're going to have to figure out an alternative energy source to use. Possibly, they can do what Africa is doing, and build a bunch of wind turbines to produce energy.
ReplyDeleteEven I tend to forget how big India is becoming. We do not hear a whole lot about them in our news. It is good that they are continuing to grow, but they need to find a better way to manage and produce energy for themselves. Having large coal reserves certainly helps them. I do not know many who still use coal in the US because of the problems it can cause in the environment, but I guess India needs it. Hopefully they can find a new way to create energy for themselves, such as wind turbines as Tyler Hoss mentioned.
ReplyDeleteIndia needs to find another way to supply their energy consumption because coal is bad for the environment. Solar power or wind is definitely the future, but both of those are very expensive and it would not make sense for India to use them right now.
ReplyDeleteI agree that they need to find cleaner, more efficient ways to provide energy, but right now coal is pretty much their only option.
DeleteI agree with previous comments that an alternative energy source needs to be taken advantage of. The issue is that many alternative sources only produce minimal power and can be costly. This may be harsh but they may need to fix this problem from the other direction and limit population as China has done with the one child policy.
ReplyDeletewith such a large population India needs a better form of energy. But at the same time many of the renewable sources don't give enough power to meet the needs of everyday Indians
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