How can India Deploy RE for a People-Centric Clean Energy Shift?

ISSUE BRIEF

How can India Enable a People-centric Clean Energy Transition?

Framework for Responsible Renewable Energy Deployment

25 February, 2025 | Energy Transitions

Parineet Kaur Chowdhury, Nicole Almeida and Akanksha Tyagi

Suggested citation: Chowdhury, Parineet Kaur, Nicole Almeida, and Akanksha Tyagi. 2025. How can India Enable a People-centric Clean Energy Transition? Framework for Responsible Renewable Energy Deployment. New Delhi, India: Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), India.

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Overview:

Accelerated deployment of renewable energy (RE) is critical to meet India’s climate goals. RE technologies provide various benefits, such as attracting investment and generating employment. However, large-scale RE projects, like other infrastructure projects, are also resource-intensive requiring land, water, etc, for deployment. The diversion of land for RE could have social and environmental impacts such as loss of livelihood, especially for landless agricultural labourers and pastoralists, impacts on biodiversity and open natural ecosystems, and so on. On the other hand, RE offers the opportunity for equitable benefit sharing, livelihood generation and restoration, undertaking local area development, and building ecological resilience.

Amid these realities, the future deployment of RE technologies must be more socially inclusive and ecologically positive. Such an inclusive transition is possible by gaining community support and buy-in. This can be achieved through ‘responsible renewable energy deployment’. Responsible deployment demands a shift in business culture and activities oriented toward mitigating social and environmental impacts while ensuring a just and equitable future.

To enable this and ensure that India’s energy transition is people-centric, we propose a framework for responsible deployment. It offers principles of responsible deployment, details on how actors can self-evaluate their practices, and where they lie in the spectrum of responsibility.

Key highlights:

Responsible deployment of an RE project is when it is implemented in a manner that is people-centric, enhances community value, is transparent and truthful and ensures ecological sustainability.
The first Principle of responsible deployment is to prioritise people-centric practices in RE projects by implementing inclusive engagements with communities and enhancing value creation for them. This would help achieve the outcomes of securing greater buy-in from communities, including representatives of all groups in decision-making regarding land procurement, shared resource governance, and community development, and establishing equitable benefit sharing from RE projects.
The second Principle of responsible deployment is to foster trust by undertaking transparent, truthful, and timely dialogue with communities. This would help achieve the outcomes of integrating transparency in business culture, establishing open lines of communication and trust between developers and local communities, and enhancing communities' decision-making ability.
The third Principle is to maximise impact by driving business integrity among all actors engaged in the deployment of an RE project. This is critical to ensure that all actors in project deployment are working together to maximise the impact of responsible business practices and integrate a culture of responsibility across the project lifecycle.
The fourth Principle is to create resilient and thriving ecological systems by integrating biodiversity protection, environmental restoration, and circular practices. This would help create regenerative ecological systems that aid local economic growth, safeguard biodiversity, and establish a circular economy across processes and materials.
Responsible actions are determined by the extent of activities, sphere of influence, and sustainability of interventions. Based on these factors, the framework outlines four levels of ambition using which the RE industry can self-evaluate its practices on the spectrum of responsibility. These levels are - Compliant, Adopter, Leader, and Pioneer.
To start moving towards responsibility, RE developers can adopt low-impact siting practicies, secure institutional funds for responsible practices that don't impact project viability, establish an internal coordination cell beyond ESG, train stakeholders on responsible practices, and refine subcontractor selection for integrity and sustainability, among others.

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Akanksha Tyagi

Programme Lead

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“Responsible deployment of renewable energy makes business sense as it provides companies with a social licence to operate and brings reputational gains. This framework supports India's journey to responsible deployment by being a standard guiding document that developers, investors, and policymakers can refer to.”

Executive summary

India is among the leading renewable energy (RE) markets, providing valuable learnings for many emerging economies in their diversified adoption and deployment. Over the last decade, RE technologies, particularly solar and wind, have emerged as affordable, modular, and scalable solutions in India’s climate action plans, including achieving net zero emissions by 2070. Further, the RE sector brings several economic co-benefits, such as increased investments and new employment opportunities. Hence, as India strives to develop while decarbonising, an accelerated deployment of large-scale RE technologies is imperative.

However, the speed and scale of deployment could have socio-environmental trade-offs that all stakeholders of the RE ecosystem should responsibly manage. Like any infrastructure, RE technologies require vast tracts of land, and changes in current use patterns, such as agriculture, could impact the livelihoods of dependent communities or the local ecology. For instance, in the case of RE projects set up on private land, landowners get monetary compensation from the sale or lease of land. However, indirect dependents, such as tenant labourers (often from marginalised sections of the society), are impacted adversely as they do not receive any compensation or rehabilitation support. On the other hand, if the land is a government ‘wasteland’, it may have ecological or cultural significance, such as being a habitat for endangered species, which could be affected due to the RE project or accompanying transmission infrastructure. Amid these realities, the future deployment of RE technologies must be more socially inclusive and environmentally safe.

Such an inclusive clean energy transition can only be made possible by securing buy-in from communities, in which they would be willing to participate by sharing their resources. The key to gaining such support is the ‘responsible deployment’ of RE, which takes a people- and environment-centric approach. This approach requires a shift in the culture and business practices of RE companies, which include investors, project developers, engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) players, contractors, and asset management players.

We propose a framework for the responsible deployment of RE projects to enable this shift. The framework aims to provide standard guidance for all actors in the Indian RE sector by answering key questions, such as what defines responsible deployment, the guiding principles, how actors can self-evaluate their actions, and where they lie on the spectrum of responsibility.

This framework results from extensive primary research and detailed discussions with communities, local government actors, and RE developers and investors. It also incorporates learnings from the available frameworks and standards (Figure ES1). The detailed methodology is provided as supplementary information.

This Responsible deployment of an RE project occurs when it is implemented in a manner that:

Is people-centric
Enhances community value
Is transparent and truthful
Ensures ecological sustainability

Principles of Responsible Deployment

It will be possible when all actors in the RE sector, such as developers (and their contractors), investors, and policymakers, adopt the following four Principles of Responsible Deployment that we propose.

Approach and methodology

Figure ES1 Approach and methodology undertaken to develop the framework

Renewable energy companies can self-evaluate their actions to see where they are on the spectrum of being responsible entities.

Responsible actions are defined by the scope of activities undertaken, sphere of influence, and sustainability of interventions.

Four levels of ambition

In this framework, responsible actions are defined by the scope of activities undertaken, sphere of influence, and sustainability of interventions. Based on these criteria, the framework proposes four levels of ambition: Compliant, Adopter, Leader, and Pioneer (Figure ES2).

Level Zero is ‘Compliant’, indicating companies adhering to the laws of the land.
Level One is ‘Adopter’, indicating companies going beyond compliance to consciously adopt readily undertaken responsible practices, albeit the sustenance of these activities is short-term. An ‘adopter’ also ensures the creation of a company- wide culture towards responsibility.
Level Two is ‘Leader’, indicating companies adopting known best practices for business responsibility that have a short-to-medium-term sustenance. ‘Leader’ also ensures that its business partners, such as EPC players in the case of RE developers, adopt these practices.
The highest level is Level Three, ‘Pioneer’, which indicates companies devising and implementing new responsibility practices and creating self- sustaining systems which ensure the impacts of their initiatives even after they move on. ‘Pioneers’ also advocate for responsible deployment among the key stakeholders, such as policymakers, and motivates them to adopt these practices.

Five key recommendations for RE developers

Among all the actors, RE project developers have the maximum potential to drive responsible deployment of these technologies. Here are the five recommendations for RE developers to kick off their journey of responsibility:

Adopt low-impact siting practices for RE projects: Start by maintaining a checklist of indicators with explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria for identifying project land. Strengthen it with more advanced screening, focusing on minimising social impacts, and ensuring projects’ resilience to climate risks.
Evaluate and institutionalise funding requirements for implementing responsible practices: Core funds and grants can be considered that provide utilisation flexibility, and do not impact project viability.
Set up an internal cell to operationalise this ‘Framework for Responsible Deployment’ that goes beyond the Environment, Social, and Governance department: This must include representatives from teams such as business development, land, and legal, to ensure internal alignment within the organisation, where different teams would consciously collaborate to improve outcomes for all.
Build the capacity of on-ground and company actors such as project teams, land aggregators, maintenance contractors etc. to familiarise and understand responsible practices: Training should encompass the core principles of responsible deployment, with themes like transparency, community development, and ecological resilience at the centre of all communications.
Assess and re-establish the selection criteria for subcontractors such as land aggregators and EPC contractors: This is to identify opportunities to maintain business integrity at each stage of project deployment, such as site identification, construction, and operations. This includes the processes of tendering, Expression of Interest, pre-qualification, pre-bid meeting, bidding, bid evaluation, negotiation, and contract formulation.