By Pratik Agarwal, Chairman, Resonia and Serentica Renewables; MD, Sterlite Electric
India is entering a fundamentally different era of energy. For decades, our challenge was simple: Produce more energy. Coal, oil, gas, renewables, and nuclear could be planned independently because each largely operated within its own ecosystem. That world has disappeared.
Today’s challenge is no longer producing energy. It is optimising an increasingly complex energy system. A unit of solar power generated at noon has a different value from a unit of hydropower during the evening peak. Batteries, pumped storage, and gas turbines all exist to balance renewable generation. Nuclear provides a steady baseload. Coal increasingly offers flexibility rather than simply volume. Every source now plays a different role at a different time of the day. Most importantly, every one of them depends on the same power grid. This changes how governments need to think about energy.
India, however, still governs the sector as though every fuel exists in isolation. Coal sits in one ministry. Oil and gas in another. Renewables in a third. Electricity in a fourth. Nuclear in a fifth. Each ministry has capable people and well-defined aims. But each is optimising only one part of the system, not the whole. That may have worked in the 20th century; it does not now.
The consequences are visible across the sector. Renewable projects are commissioned before transmission is ready. Gas-based plants were built without assured fuel. Coal output, imports, railway logistics, and electricity demand have at times moved on different trajectories. Each ministry has largely achieved its own objectives, yet the overall system has often fallen short. Governance, not policy, is the problem.
Energy security is no longer about having enough coal or renewable capacity. It is about ensuring the entire system works as one. That requires integrated planning across generation, fuel supply, transmission, storage, and demand. Every investment should be evaluated based on how it improves the performance of the whole system, not one technology in isolation.
The US, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and the UK have unified energy ministries responsible for looking across the entire energy landscape rather than individual fuels. India should do the same. A single ministry of energy won’t eliminate expertise. Coal, oil, renewables, and nuclear will continue to need dedicated departments and technical institutions. But strategy will come from one place. Infrastructure will be planned as one system. Investment decisions will be made with a single objective: Delivering the lowest-cost, most reliable, and most secure energy mix for India.
As India aims to become a developed economy, energy will become one of our biggest competitive advantages — or one of our biggest constraints. Our institutions need to evolve as quickly as our energy system has. Creating a unified ministry of energy may well be the single most important governance reform for India to strengthen its long-term energy security.