Need to balance development and environment: Goyal

Government is looking at resetting the solar power generation target to a whopping 1,00,000 MW for 2022 from the current 20,000 MW set for the period, Coal and Renewable Energy Minister Piyush Goyal said today adding there was a need for pragmatic approach for balancing environment and development.
"We have reset the targets of renewable energy, the earlier target for solar energy was 20,000 MW till 2022, which we are trying to reset to 1,00,000 MW," he said at a TERI event today.
Urging a holistic and pragmatic approach in dealing with environment and development, Goyal said, "Once the development needs of a country are addressed then talking about environment makes sense."

We still have unsatiated needs for development and for roads and highways to come up we have to take a more pragmatic view, he said.
"If we have 1.25 billion people we will obviously have more carbon emissions.
"Just because we have carbon emissions we have to stall our infrastructure plan? Only under the garb of environment protection,?" he added.

On the Solar front he said: "We believe that there is enough potential, we can work towards providing grid parity towards solar in the longer run and make it economically viable over a period of time".
"I want to make it (solar power sector) a self sustaining industry, not dependent on government subsidy or sops, I believe that subsidies can only get you so far (to an extent) but they cannot revolutionise the sector," he added.

The minister also hinted at "relooking at the subsidy regime in the solar industry to make it more target oriented and sustainable in the long run".