US and European efforts to subsidise domestic renewable energy industries are tantamount to western “protectionism” and will hold back developing countries’ climate ambitions, India’s power minister has warned.
Raj Kumar Singh, India’s minister for power and renewable energy, said measures such as the US Inflation Reduction Act and Europe’s green hydrogen auctions, which both offer heavy subsidies to renewable industries, would undermine budding clean energy production in emerging economies such as India.
“This protectionism — I saw that in the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States. I see that in this green hydrogen auction in Europe,” Singh told the Financial Times. “We’ve had the developed world lecturing the rest of the world on how important free trade is . . . And here they themselves are erecting barriers.”