Time to go in for green energy: Montek

As the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change begins today, the Plan panel has said that it's time discoms sourced a part of their needs from green energy producers, besides favouring energy efficiency norms for all household appliances.

The government has to encourage development of green energy sources by asking power distribution companies (discoms) to source a part of their requirements from the producers of non-conventional energy, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia told reporters on the sidelines of a CII conference on Clean Technologies here today.

"I will say that electrical appliances, refrigerators, television... Can have energy-efficiency norms. We won't be the only country to do this, this is happening around the world," he said.

The government, Ahluwalia said, has been trying to encourage development of non-conventional energy and raise energy efficiency as part of the recently unveiled integrated energy policy.

"In the integrated energy policy, we have drawn attention to this and also in the National Action Plan for Climate Change. One of the obvious things we can do is to move to much better fuel efficiency standards ...And the Bureau of Energy Efficiency is doing a lot of work on this," he added.

Ahluwalia said transport and construction sectors have huge possibility of implementing fuel efficiency norms and the Planning Commission is preparing a paper on related energy issues
.

"We are preparing a paper, depending on timing whether they decide to have an NDC (National Development Council) meeting or not, but we are preparing a paper on energy issues which could go before the NDC. It is an important set of interrelated subjects," he said.

Earlier, addressing the seminar he said the government could come out with measures like reducing dependence on imported energy and could shift to indigenous energy like renewable or solar energy.