The Government’s India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP) recommends undertaking a massive consumer awareness programme to inform and change AC user behaviour, as part of its larger aim to provide access to sustainable cooling to the masses while minimising its environmental effects. To enable this ambition, CEEW is pleased to present research findings from our survey and a randomised control trial experiment with Indian consumers to understand their AC servicing behaviour, examine alternative interventions, and glean insights for India’s energy and climate policies.

The session will bring together sectoral experts to discuss a way forward in designing and undertaking a consumer awareness programme for India’s AC use and maintenance.

India has at least a USD 50 billion market opportunity for clean energy innovations to power rural livelihoods. The USD 3 million Powering Livelihoods initiative aims to catalyse this market by providing capital and technical support to social enterprises deploying clean energy-powered livelihood appliances to enable large-scale commercial deployments.

The launch will also introduce the six cohort enterprises under Powering Livelihoods. These enterprises are deploying a wide variety of clean energy-powered livelihood solutions including water pumps, multipurpose food processors, commercial refrigerators and textile machinery (reeling, spinning and weaving).

The discussion will focus on tenets of training and institutionalising certification systems that enable job security and safety for technicians, optimise energy efficiency, and facilitate a smoother transition towards alternative technologies in keeping with India’s Kigali commitments. This is the first of several India focussed high-level stakeholder engagements dedicated to the servicing sector, conceptualised as a platform to collectively engage on, and achieve, servicing sector goals as encapsulated in India’s Cooling Action Plan.

During this session, CEEW and Shakti will present research findings and formally release two studies related to training and certifying India’s AC servicing technicians – Safety, Upskilling, and Good Servicing Practices for Cooling and A Universal Certification System for India’s refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Servicing Sector. This dialogue will bring together key experts in government and implementing agencies to deliberate on these research findings, with the aim of benefiting holistic growth and development of this large labour force to aide India’s clean cooling transition.

COVID-19 recovery plans of governments across the world are being scrutinised for climate action commitments. Under the guise of COVID-19 recovery measures, some governments have dedicated large sums of public money into the struggling fossil fuel industry. India has tried to maintain a balance in supporting the renewable energy sector to attract new investment, and sustaining the current system that is reliant on the fossil fuel industry.

The webinar will feature insights from IISD’s Energy Policy Tracker. We will begin by showcasing key policy imperatives from countries across the world. We will then delve into India’s power sector, which has remained the bulwark of the transition in India. We will explore the role coal will play in the power system, how we can wean away from dependence on more coal, and understand the challenges in providing livelihoods for those dependent on coal. Insights from this session would be useful to policymakers, analysts, and other stakeholders interested in the power sector in India and globally.