Resource-Related Challenges in a Selected Country (STREAM) — Term Paper: India's Energy Sector, Coal Dependence and the Transition to Solar and Storage
This first-semester term paper for the STREAM programme takes a single country and a single resource sector and examines the challenges that arise where the two meet. India was selected for its energy sector — a case where scale, growth rate and an entrenched coal base make the tension between development need and environmental limit unusually sharp. The paper is written as an academic scientific text of roughly twenty pages, structured across the four sections the brief specifies and supported throughout by peer-reviewed literature, institutional reports and official statistical sources. The opening section establishes the country context: geographical position and climatic variation, population size and distribution, the shape and growth trajectory of the economy, development status against recognised indicators, and why the energy sector in particular is decisive for the country's near-term development path. The second section analyses the current status of the resource itself. Domestic coal reserves and their geographical concentration are set against renewable potential, particularly solar irradiance across the western and southern states. Production and consumption figures are traced over recent years, the import dependency for crude oil, gas and coking coal is quantified, and the major pressures are identified — demand growth outpacing capacity addition, the financial condition of distribution utilities, grid integration limits for variable generation, and the storage gap that constrains how far solar can displace baseload. The third section covers infrastructure and value chains. It describes the generation fleet, transmission and distribution network, and the logistics moving coal from pithead to plant, then follows the value chains attached to the resource — mining, power generation, equipment manufacturing and the growing domestic solar module and cell industry. Key stakeholders are mapped across central and state government, regulators, public and private generators, distribution companies, industrial consumers and the mining workforce whose livelihoods a transition directly affects. The final section addresses environmental problems and their connections to resource use. Ambient air quality and its public health burden, the water demand of thermal generation in already water-stressed basins, land degradation and displacement around mining regions, ash management and greenhouse gas emissions are each examined as consequences of the existing energy system rather than as separate issues. The section closes on future developments and risks: the plausible trajectories for renewable capacity and storage deployment, the stranded asset question for recently built thermal plants, and what a socially just transition would require of policy.
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