EU to help India achieve energy efficiency in agri

The Dollar Business Bureau

Agriculture in India utilises around 18 percent of the overall electricity consumed. In order to deal with energy security, implement country’s climate commitments, to ensure food security and tackle with water problems, India has to take into consideration power efficiency in irrigation.

“Keeping this issue in mind, the European Union (EU) has come up with financial and policy experts and European businesses to help India achieve energy efficiency in agricultural demand side management,” said Tomasz Kozlowski, Ambassador, EU delegation to India.

“The cooperation between India and the EU will support policy dialogue, bring business solutions, best practices, and combined research and innovation as well as look at the models to finance clean energy and climate change,” said Kozlowski while addressing a workshop organised by FICCI and European Commission on Monday.

On financial support, he said that India has already got loans of over 1.2 billion euros from the European Investment Bank to support its energy and climate-related projects.

EU is looking to develop solar parks, offshore wind, and energy efficiency projects in India, he added.

“There are around 20.27 million electric pumpsets fitted in the agriculture sector. Due to the rising demand of water for agricultural requirements, around 0.25 to 0.5 million additional pumpsets are being installed every year. By adopting energy-efficiency pumpsets, we can save around 25-30 percent energy,” said B P Pandey, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Power.

Earlier, the industry had enough pumpsets to distribute to the agricultural community but there was a lack of funding to adopt these pumpsets, Pandey said.

A Didar Singh, Secretary General of FICCI said, “By bringing together stakeholders from the EU and India, the workshop focused on promoting cooperation between the two sides in the area of AgDSM, one of the biggest focus areas for Indian policymakers in the DSM space.”