US-India Strategic Clean Energy Partnership (SCEP)

WHY IN THE NEWS?

Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas, Hardeep Singh Puri and U.S. Secretary of Energy Ms. Jennifer Granholm, co-chaired a virtual Ministerial meeting and launched the revamped U.S.-India Strategic Clean Energy Partnership (SCEP).

About:

• In the meeting, both the sides reviewed progress & major accomplishments and prioritized new areas for cooperation across several pillars.
• Indian side noted that, this revamped clean energy partnership will intensify the efforts to take advantage of complementarities that exists between both the countries.
• They also announced addition of a fifth Pillar on Emerging Fuels as both the countries seek to promote clean energy fuels.
• On the occasion, a new India-US Task Force on Biofuels was also announced in order to build the scope of work on cooperation in biofuels sector.

Strategic Clean Energy Partnership (SCEP)

• SCEP was launched in line with U.S.-India Climate and Clean Energy Agenda 2030 Partnership that was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Joe Biden in April 2021 at the Leaders’ Summit on Climate.
• It organizes inter-governmental engagement on the basis of five pillars of cooperation:

1. Power and Energy Efficiency
2. Responsible Oil and Gas
3. Renewable Energy
4. Sustainable Growth and
5. Emerging Fuels.

India-US cooperation on renewable energy fuel

Both sides will put emphasis on upscaling cooperation under renewable energy pillar by working on various projects and system-friendly practices in the renewable energy sector. They also seek to strengthen electric grid in India to extend support to large-scale integration of renewables including smart grids, flexible resources, energy storage, and distributed energy resources.

Gas Task Force

They also announced renaming the Gas Task Force to India-US Low Emissions Gas Task Force. This task force will continue to forge collaboration between Indian and US companies on innovative projects to provide support to India’s vision of gas-based economy.