The role of coal plant retrofitting strategies in developing India's net-zero power system: a data-driven sub-national analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how retrofitting India's coal plants with carbon capture and biomass co-firing can facilitate achieving net-zero emissions by 2070, considering regional variations and policy scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a data-driven model of India's power sector to evaluate the impact of retrofitting strategies under different emission caps and regional conditions.

Findings

Retrofitting can occur by 2035 with strict emission caps.

Retrofitting reduces coal capacity and costs.

Renewable energy alone lowers costs but causes regional disparities.

Abstract

India set two Nationally Determined Contribution targets to achieve the net zero carbon emission goal by 2070, which requires deep decarbonization of India's power generation sector. Yet, coal power generation contributes to more than 60\% of its total power generation, and policies still permit further coal fleet expansion and lifetime extensions. In this paper, we investigate the role of retrofitting India's coal plants for carbon capture and storage and biomass co-firing in developing the net-zero power system. We model the power generation and transmission network expansions across 30 Indian states in four representative grid evolution scenarios under progressively tighter carbon emission caps, taking into account sub-national coal price variation and thermal efficiency of individual coal plants. We find that coal plant retrofitting could happen by 2035 when an annual carbon cap for the power generation sector is less than 1,000 million tons CO$_2$. This reduces the unabated coal plant capacity, electricity generation, and carbon abatement costs. Exploiting renewable energy potentials solely, such as wind resources, could reduce carbon abatement costs significantly but will result in low coal plant utilization and uneven renewable generation deployment between Southern and Central regions concerning energy justice.