Statsguru: Six charts explain India's changing energy landscape

India is consuming more energy with increasing economic activity. Energy consumption has jumped 30 per cent to 33,508 petajoules since 2012-13. However, data from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementations’ Energy Statistics India 2023, report showed that growth has slowed after the pandemic. Overall energy consumption has barely risen since 2018-19 on an absolute basis. It used to go up by a tenth every three years.
 

Most of the consumption is still driven by non-renewable sources of energy — coal, lignite, natural gas, and crude petroleum account for 86 per cent of consumption.



Among the available energy sources, the consumption of electricity is growing the fastest at a compound annual rate of 5.16 per cent since 2012-13, compared to 2.94 per cent for all energy resources overall during the same period. Consumption of other resources like natural gas and crude oil has grown slower.
 

The industrial sector is the biggest consumer of electricity and accounted for 41 per cent of the 1,296,300 gigawatt hours of electricity consumed in India in 2021-22.  Agriculture was at 18 per cent.



The country’s energy efficiency has also improved.  India’s energy intensity, which is the amount of energy consumed in producing one unit of gross domestic product (GDP), has declined from 0.28 megajoules per rupee to 0.22 megajoules per rupee. This shows that the amount of energy consumed to produce each unit of GDP is declining over time — a major indicator of the country’s improving energy efficiency. 

The level of disruption caused by the pandemic can be seen in energy consumption per person in a year. Although it has increased to 24,453 megajoules, or 17.1 per cent over 20,874 megajoules in 2012-13, much of the growth came till 2018-19. The latest figure is below the pre-pandemic level.