U.S. energy secretary Jennifer Granholm and India’s minister of petroleum and natural gas Hardeep Singh Puri remotely meet (with others in the background) during the virtual launch of a "newly revitalized” U.S.-India clean energy partnership.
U.S. energy secretary Jennifer Granholm and India’s minister of petroleum and natural gas, Hardeep Singh Puri, last week presided over the virtual launch of what the Department of Energy termed the “newly revitalized” U.S.-India Strategic Clean Energy Partnership (SCEP).
The SCEP is part of the U.S.-India Climate and Clean Energy Agenda 2030 Partnership, a collaborative effort launched in April by President Biden and India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, at the Leaders Summit on Climate. According to a September 9 DOE press release, the revamped SCEP “places greater emphasis on electrification and decarbonization of processes and end uses, scaling up and accelerating deployment of emerging clean energy technologies, and finding solutions for hard-to-decarbonize sectors.”
Among other commitments, the United States and India have agreed under the SCEP to continue cutting-edge research and development through the U.S.-India Partnership to Advance Clean Energy–Research, prioritizing research on emerging clean energy technologies; continue to advance innovation in civil nuclear power as a net-zero solution through different collaborative programs, including the long-standing Civil Nuclear Energy Working Group; and engage the private sector and other stakeholders to help deploy clean technologies to accelerate a clean energy transition.
From the cochairs: “We are excited to work with our partners in India to revitalize and accelerate our clean energy efforts through technology innovation and public-private partnerships,” Granholm said. “Working together, we will deploy key technical solutions to enable sustainable clean energy growth while mitigating climate change impacts, realizing the vision laid out by President Biden and Prime Minister Modi under the U.S.-India Climate and Clean Energy Agenda 2030 Partnership.”
Puri commented, “We will intensify efforts to take advantage of the complementarities of both countries—advanced U.S. technologies and India’s rapidly growing energy market—for a win-win situation. Our collective efforts will focus on developing a cleaner energy road map with low-carbon pathways.”
