Implementing pollution controls in India’s coal power plants and utilizing renewable energy: Synergies and trade-offs for air quality, public health and climate.

India experiences some of the highest ambient PM_2.5 pollution concentrations in the world, which led to an estimated 1.67 million premature deaths in 2019. The power sector alone accounts for 20% of PM_2.5-related deaths in the country, making it the highest contributor to PM_2.5-related mortality per unit of generating capacity globally. In addition, a transition from coal power to renewable energy in India is critical for meeting global climate targets, while currently India’s CO₂ emissions are rapidly rising. With India's electricity demand projected to quadruple between 2022 and 2047, understanding the environmental trade-offs between various power sector expansion pathways, particularly the effects of continuing to operate coal power plants without pollution controls, implementing pollution controls on them, or increasingly implementing renewable energy (RE) is critical for weighing the impact of the future power sector on air pollution, public health and climate.

We have developed an integrated assessment framework to investigate the current and future air quality, public health, and carbon emission implications of India’s power sector operation. In addition, our analysis also considers the climate effects associated with aerosols from power sector, which can influence regional radiative forcing and temperature patterns. We have constructed a detailed, plant-level emission inventory for India’s coal-fired power plants, which had a total installed capacity of 212 GW in 2022. We then implemented our plant-level coal power emission inventory in the WRF-Chem 4.6.1 air quality model to simulate the impact of various possible power sector expansion pathways on regional air pollution and radiative forcing resulting from various aerosol distributions.

We also developed a new tagging scheme in WRF-Chem that attributes simulated PM_2.5 concentrations to individual power plant emissions and evaluates the location-specific impacts of these emissions on air quality and public health. This approach allows us to identify those power plants with the largest adverse impacts on public health. This information can then be used by policy makers in determining power generation and public health priorities.