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India, being one of the fastest-growing economiess in recent times, has witnessed a rise in energy consumption with associated implications on energy availability and energy security. The country recognizes these challenges and has accelerated its efforts with varied degree of success by initiating various programs, policies, and required institutional arrangements to ameliorate these challenges. This paper attempts to review the development of nation’s policy programs to trace the progress so far, in terms of energy efficiency and conservation. Energy being a cross-sectoral issue has been dealt with holistically in this paper, with special reference to the policy instruments that have been instrumental in realizing the energy-saving potential and in integrating renewable energy in building sector. Further, an attempt is made to draw the success/failure with respect to various policies and programs, along with a detailed analysis of various missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is clear that developing countries will have to be part of the global mitigation effort to avoid ‘dangerous climate change’, and, indeed, many of them are already undertaking significant actions on multiple fronts to help address this problem, even if they have not yet taken on legally binding commitment under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Since the deployment of GHG-mitigating technologies is already a significant part of this effort and likely to be even more so in the future, drawing lessons from existing programmes can help accelerate and enhance the effectiveness of this deployment process. Accordingly, this article aims to examine the deployment of wind and solar power in India, paying specific attention to the role of public policy in incentivizing and facilitating this deployment, how these policies have evolved over time, what has shaped this evolution, and what the learning has been over this period. Through this analysis, the intention is to draw out key lessons from India's experience with deployment policies and programmes in these two sectors and highlight the issues that will need to be given particular consideration in the design of future domestic policies and international cooperation programmes to enhance the move towards climate-compatible development in India. Many of these lessons should also be relevant for other developing countries that are attempting to balance their climate and developmental priorities through the deployment of renewable energy technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clean development mechanism (CDM) could play an important role in the power generation sector of developing countries and emerging economies by providing additional revenue to support the diffusion of renewable energy sources (RES). This paper investigates the contribution of the CDM to deployment of renewable electricity projects in China and India, and highlights the main potentialities and limitations of this mechanism for their support. The outcome of our analysis shows many differences and similarities in the way and scale of CDM projects for renewable electricity generation have been implemented in the two countries. In both cases, the CDM has made a contribution to greening investments in the power generation sector, which is still largely dominated by subcritical coal-fuelled power plants. Nonetheless, some major problems still remain and they are mainly related to the distribution of projects across different technologies and to the environmental integrity of the mechanism. In view of the likely revision of the CDM in the post-Kyoto period, we find that the differentiation of the credit generation rate of different project categories could bring some level of improvement without significantly altering the current system functionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]