New Delhi: Centre is working on a programme to promote electric cooking in line with the country’s climate targets.
Talking to reporters on the sideline of the a conference on electric cooking organized by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) and the ministry of power here on Monday, Additional Secretary, ministry of power, Ajay Tewari said that the government is looking at meeting the requirement of energy for cooking through renewable energy and by 2030 a large number of households in the country are expected to adopt electric cooking.
He also said that government may provide subsidy support for some of the households in rural India under the planned programme if the need arises
“We want to promote e-cooking in a big way so that we move away from the fossil fuels to the non-fossil fuels because on the other side we are also promoting RE (renewable energy) and India is doing a stellar job in promoting RE. Now we are trying to come out with a electric cooking model in such a manner which is affordable to even to rural areas because in urban areas people can afford to pay the electricity bills regularly but for rural areas we want to come out with such a model where carbon credits will also get aggregated which will offset some cost to the electricity consumed,” the official said.
“It should be Indianised in such a manner so that the Indian households are comfortable with it. It should be affordable in the sense that if we link it with the solar or wind or some kind of RE which is cheaper in our country and is coming from non-fossil sources. That is how we are trying to develog a model, where we can, if required initially government may give some subisidy also to some rural households and later on it will pick up once it is aggregated and demand comes from the people,” he added.
Addressing the ‘Conference on Consumer-Centric Approaches for E-cooking Transition’ Tewari said that e-cooking is going to be an environment-friendly habit for all Indians in the times to come.
Talking of the progress on the renewable energy front, the official said: “We are going to achieve renewable energy targets much earlier than the timelines we announced. This is evident from our achievement of Nationally Determined Contributions nine years ahead of target and our renewable energy targets.”
“Electric cooking is going to be our focus after the success of Ujjwala. From the health point of view of our rural women or households, Ujjwala brought in clean cooking. On the other hand, we still depend on gas. We do not have gas reserves in our country, which may be just good enough for our urban gas supply for cooking but it may not be sufficient for other uses, so we need to preserve gas and switch over to electricity.”
He noted that solar cooking, e-cooking and solar thermal cooking need to be be promoted especially for the rural areas.
He also said that the government will come out with an aggregation model which would be operated by Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL).
The official also said that that 700 million people in the world still do not have access to electricity and that universal energy access is one of the priorities of G20 under India’s presidency.
Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
Updated: 05 Jun 2023, 08:55 PM IST