India's energy crossroads: Why we cannot afford to get this wrong

By Shankar Sharma* 

India stands at an energy inflection point unlike any it has faced before. The accelerating demand from artificial intelligence infrastructure, data centres, air conditioning, and electric vehicles is generating powerful lobbying for a major expansion of nuclear power. Before we commit to that path, we owe ourselves — and every living thing dependent on this land — a clear-eyed reckoning with the full costs involved.

This is not an abstract policy debate. The decisions being made today will shape India's water security, its forests, its fiscal health, and the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people for generations to come.

The Hidden Costs of the Nuclear Push

Nuclear power carries a seductive logic: dense, reliable, low-carbon. But for a resource-constrained country already under stress, the full ledger looks very different. Nuclear plants demand enormous capital outlays, divert precious land and freshwater, generate long-lived radioactive waste, and carry risks — however statistically manageable — that other technologies do not. A nation already classified as freshwater-stressed cannot treat water-intensive power infrastructure as cost-free.

Meanwhile, recent analysis finds that renewables are, on average, 53% cheaper than nuclear power on a per-unit basis. That is not a marginal difference. It is a fundamental argument about where scarce public capital should go.

The Solar Opportunity We Are Under-Using

India receives roughly 5,000 trillion units of solar energy per year. In 2024-25, total national electricity generation was under 2,000 billion units. The arithmetic is staggering: our solar endowment dwarfs our entire demand by orders of magnitude.

Two solar deployment pathways alone — agri-photovoltaic systems (with a technical potential of approximately 4,177 GW) and rooftop solar across urban and rural settings (approximately 960 GW) — represent a combined capacity exceeding 5,200 GW. India's current total installed power capacity is around 505 GW. These are not speculative numbers. They reflect real, deployable technology at declining costs. Solar PV capital costs are projected to fall to as low as $192 per kilowatt by 2050.

Globally, the trend is unambiguous. According to Ember's 2026 Global Electricity Review, solar and wind together met 99% of new electricity demand worldwide last year, with battery storage increasingly enabling round-the-clock reliability. Clean energy sources have now overtaken coal in global generation share.

A Distributed Future Is Within Reach

The most resilient and equitable energy system for India is not one built around large, centralised, capital-intensive plants — whether nuclear or otherwise. It is one built from the ground up: rooftop solar panels, small and medium wind turbines, community-scale bioenergy units, battery storage, and smart distribution networks.

This model is already working. Solar mini-grids are transforming lives in Jharkhand's remote villages. The PM-KUSUM scheme is demonstrating how farm solarisation can simultaneously reduce the government's electricity subsidy burden — estimated at ₹2.4 lakh crore — while improving farmer incomes and energy access. Industrial self-generation of solar power has demonstrated cost reductions of up to 33% compared to conventional power purchase agreements, as research from Brazil has shown in comparable contexts.

A distributed renewable system of sufficient scale can realistically meet India's electricity needs for decades — at the lowest overall societal cost, and without the environmental and financial tail risks that nuclear and coal impose.

What Is at Stake If We Choose Wrongly

India is not choosing between energy and no energy. It is choosing between energy pathways — and the choice carries enormous consequences.

Large centralised power infrastructure, whether nuclear plants, mega solar parks, pumped storage schemes, or long-distance transmission corridors, involves the diversion of land, displacement of communities, fragmentation of forests, and disruption of water systems. In a country already facing biodiversity loss and ecological stress, each such decision compounds the pressure on natural systems that underpin food, water, and climate security.

The AI and data centre boom adds a dimension that demands honest scrutiny. These facilities consume not just electricity but water — in cooling systems — at a scale that is only beginning to be understood. Proposals to dedicate new nuclear reactors specifically to powering data centres should be evaluated not as a narrow technology choice, but as a major public interest decision requiring wide societal consultation.

The Case for Democratic Deliberation

India's energy future is too consequential to be decided in ministry corridors and corporate boardrooms alone. Civil society — farmers, forest communities, urban residents, environmental scientists, public health experts — has a legitimate stake in these choices and a right to participate meaningfully in making them.

Before committing to scores of high-impact projects currently in planning or execution — nuclear plants, coal expansions, large hydro schemes, transmission mega-corridors — the public deserves full transparency about what is being built, why, and at whose expense.

The lobbying power behind AI infrastructure and nuclear energy is formidable. The voice of a water-stressed village, a forest-edge community, or a farmer dependent on a functioning aquifer is not. Ensuring that energy policy reflects the welfare of all sections of society — including the ecosystems on which human welfare ultimately depends — is not a luxury. It is the minimum standard of responsible governance.

India has the renewable endowment to power its future cleanly, affordably, and equitably. The question is whether we will have the wisdom to use it.

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*Power and climate policy analyst based in Sagara, Karnataka. This article is based on an email alert distributed by the author