This is part of a series of policy briefs by the British High Commission, New Delhi, on the work of the India-UK partnership on energy and green growth. You can access the other policy briefs here.

Energy efficiency is the lowest cost way of meeting India’s energy needs and can enable India to decouple rising growth from rising emissions. As a result India announced an ambitious climate change policy to make the Indian economy significantly more energy efficient.

Given this context, energy efficiency will play a critical role in delivering green growth in India. This realisation stimulated demand for an India-UK energy efficiency partnership. The partnership jointly commissioned advocacy, technical assistance and outreach initiatives, based on UK experience and expertise that has supported innovations and deployment of energy efficient solutions. In particular targeting buildings, standards and labelling, demand side management, and industrial efficiency, and finance.

This partnership has helped unlock the Indian energy efficiency sector, leading to longer term benefits for Indian companies including technology providers, financial investors and advisory firms at the same time showcasing UK expertise.

Early pilot projects focused on developing baselines, defining energy standards, undertaking market need-assessments, developing trading mechanisms and promoting awareness building. Subsequent work developed investment strategies with the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) of India. Key stakeholders such as industries, business confederations and other end-users of energy were engaged, to contribute to this process and ensure buy in.

Key messages:

• India has shown considerable foresight in deploying energy efficiency as one of the primary weapons in combating climate change.
• India’s Standards and Labelling program, Perform, Achieve and Trade scheme, and The Energy Conservation Building Code are major steps towards meeting India's energy efficiency and energy security goals.
• The Indo-UK energy efficiency journey has led to changes in industrial and domestic consumers of energy leading to an overall market shift.
• Viability of energy efficient investments depend on national and states policies and actions
• To support better coordinated and integrated policy-making and implementation, multi-level government stakeholders and non-government actors, including relevant policy and technical think-tanks, development partners and the private sector need to work together.