Kingsmill Bond

And then the next one that I'd really want to talk about is the grid equipment.

Because actually we had Kingsmill Bond from Ember on the podcast very recently.

It was recorded.

It will be released by the time this has gone out.

And there's a growing consensus among the more techno-optimistic analysts that the world's largest democracy and most populous country on the planet may be following a very different path to its eastern neighbour.

As energy analyst Kingsmill Bond rather neatly put it in a recent article for Yale Environment 360, China built on coal.

India is building on sun.

It's a fantastic headline, don't you think? But is it actually true? Hello, and welcome to Just Have a Think.

So we can say that in a little more than 18 months, India has added something approaching two thirds to its entire solar fleet.

Industry analysts Wood Mackenzie now expect India to install more than 50 gigawatts just during 2026 alone.

In fact, according to analysis by the industry think tank Ember, which is where Kingsmill Bond holds the role of energy strategist, When you add solar PV to all the other clean sources of energy, you find that they collectively now account for 27% of India's total electricity generation, moving the country ahead of Canada and France for the first time.

And of course the naysayers will be quick to point out that that still leaves 73% coming from fossil fuels, much of which is coal.

I've been looking forward to this.

A couple of years ago, we had your colleague Kingsmill Bond on.

And so this is sort of a, frankly, a bit of a palate cleanser after many episodes all about hydrocarbons and volatility and our dependence on them and the impact they're having on the world economy.

This is about renewables.

This connects to the line Zeke drew at the end of our first segment about whether a decline in emissions is truly structural.

So what would that kind of shift look like? Kingsmill Bond of Carbon Tracker, who we heard last time, shared his view on that in episode one fifty-two from August twenty twenty-one.

Earlier in that conversation, he and Chris had been talking about how emerging economies might leapfrog the old energy system.

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