Manufacturing firms list green goals; environmentalists say more needed

Manufacturing companies in India, parti­cularly the ones that are energy in­t­ensive and score poorly on overall sensitivity to the environment, will need to have a much more explicit, calibrated and well-planned strategy to achieve carbon neutrality and cut greenhouse gas emissions, environmentalists say.

The comments come against the backdrop of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which warns of extreme climate occurrences and their irreversible nature.

Top officials at manufacturing firms claim they are already working on green goals. "We have made several commitments in the past, including carbon neutrality by 2040. But we now have 10 specific ESG (Environment, Governance, and Social) targets. Seven out of these are for the environment,” said Amit Sinha, president-Group Strategy at Mahindra and Mahindra, who also heads the group’s sustainability mandate. These, he says, include targets on energy productivity, use of renewable energy, sending zero waste to landfills, water recyclability (being achieved this year) and 5 million tree plantation under our Project Hariyali.

Tata Power was the first power company to declare a net-zero target for itself. It will make no new investment in the thermal power sector, and focus solely on expansion in renewable energy. “We took a stand last year and will not make any new investment in coal ourselves or through our platform Resurgent. We will be net-zero carbon by 2050,” Praveer Sinha, Tata Power managing director, said in an earlier interaction with Business Standard. Tata Power currently has 2,667 MW renewable capacity and 1,300 MW is under implementation. It is looking to commission 1,000 MW this year.

“By the end of FY22, we will have more than 40 per cent coming from renewables,” Sinha had said. The company plans to add nearly 2GW of new generation capacity through hybrid models like solar and wind, and solar and storage.

 

NTPC Limited, India's largest power generator and a thermal power giant, recently decided to add 60 GW of renewable energy capacity consisting of solar and wind power by 2032. This is equivalent to NTPC's cumulative installed ca­p­a­city currently. The company's generation backbone is coal, which is a reason it has not declared any net-zero target. It is looking to blend renewable with its existing thermal power at some lo­cations. NTPC plans to retire existing coal-fired plants before that timeline, or hive them off.

Meanwhile, executives at JSW Energy said the company will not add any more thermal capacity and will focus on renewables. JSW Energy plans to expand its current renewable energy capacity of 4.6 GW to 10 GW by FY25 and to 20 GW by FY30.

Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director of research and advocacy at think-tank Centre for Science and Environment, points out that the “manufacturing sector will definitely require a very strong decarbonisation strategy, specially the energy-intensive ones like automobile, cement, steel and power. It needs to be backed by clear targets and mandates and a technology roadmap so that it gets aligned with reducing absolute emissions.”

A spokesperson of Ambuja Cements said it is progressing on its Sustainable Development Plan 2030, with a sharper focus on climate and energy. By 2030, it aims to reduce CO2 emissions and targets to reuse 13.5 million tonnes of waste and be 13 times water positive. An ITC spokes­person said the company is pursu­ing a low carbon growth strategy through extensive de-carbonisation programmes across its value chain. Over 41 per cent of ITC’s total energy requirements are met from renewable sources such as biomass, wind and solar, she said. By 2030, it plans to reduce specific energy consum­p­tion by 30 per cent and specific greenhouse gas emission 50 per cent as compared to 2018-19 baseline.