India contains 1.4bn people, generates almost $4trn pa of GDP and uses 9% of the world’s total useful energy. Will India be the first country to industrialize primarily around solar, and if so, what will this look like? This data-file captures our forecasts for India’s energy demand, and how it will evolve over time, as a useful reference, ranging across our broader models.
If India’s GDP rises at 5% pa to 2050, then GDP per capita will treble to $8k pp pa. These numbers come from our population and GDP databases.
In turn, this suggests India’s energy use per capita will rise at 3% pa, and double to 10MWH pp pa. This is still only one-third of Western levels today, suggesting further long-term upside. These numbers come from our global energy demand trackers and studies for how energy use rises with income.
Yet 80% of India’s increase in energy demand through 2050 is seen coming from solar, due to very large solar resources, solar costs are falling to the bottom of the LCOE cost curve, India is sensitive to costs, and India is sunny (19% average capacity factor on solar deployed to-date).
Low-income consumers may find cheap yet erratic power more compelling than ultra-reliable mid-priced power, including for AC and mobility. We can even imagine entire cities growing around the fringes of round-the-clock solar+battery arrays, to absorb cheap, excess, yet erratic power, per our note here.
50% of India’s useful energy thus comes from solar in 2050, which draws from trends already visibly underway in our India power grid tracker, our global wind and solar capacity additions forecasts, and our global electricity supply-demand models.
Nevertheless, we still see India’s oil demand growing at 1% pa from 5.6Mbpd in 2024 to 7Mbpd in 2050. These numbers connect to our global vehicle databases and global oil demand models.
We also see India’s gas demand rising enormously, at 7% pa, from 7bcfd to 43bcfd, including as LNG. These numbers connect to our global gas demand models and global LNG supply models.
India’s coal use is seen rising through 2030, then plateauing, then gently declining due to resource maturation and air quality preferences, then falling sharply in the 2040s to one-third of today’s levels by 2050. These numbers come from our global coal supply-demand models.
Overall, this data-file contains our forecasts for India’s energy demand, and how it will evolve over time, as a useful reference. The underlying inputs integrate across all of our other supply-demand models. Access to all of our models is available as part of a TSE subscription.