IEW 2026 Day 3: Experts Highlight Data, Technology and Balanced Energy Pathways for India

The third day of India Energy Week (IEW) 2026 underscored the importance of aligning policy, data, technology and investment to meet India’s fast-growing energy demand, as leaders from government, industry and global institutions outlined strategies for a secure, resilient and inclusive energy future.

At the Global Energy Conclave, coinciding with the release of the IEA India Bioenergy Market Report: Outlook for Liquid and Gaseous Biofuels to 2030 and the fifth edition of the PPAC Journal Ensuring Energy Security: Role of State Energy Policies, Neeraj Mittal, Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, said India’s bioenergy sector could grow significantly faster than overall energy demand and emerge as a major pillar of energy security, emissions reduction and rural development.

“India’s energy consumption is in the lower half globally on a per capita basis, but its growth rate is almost twice the world average. In the next decade, India’s energy growth could outstrip global growth by a factor of two or more,” Mittal said. He highlighted the success of the ethanol blending programme, noting that blending has increased from 1.4 percent in 2014 to nearly 20 percent today, with similar targets for biodiesel, compressed biogas and sustainable aviation fuel.

Dr Paolo Frankl, Head of the Renewable Energy Division at the International Energy Agency (IEA), presented key findings of the report, stating that India has tripled its consumption of modern bioenergy since 2020 and could double deployment again by 2030 under enhanced policy implementation.

In another Leadership Spotlight Session titled, 'Empowering economic policy with energy data: steering India’s growth towards Viksit Bharat 2047,' Pankaj Jain, former Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Member Secretary of the Eighth Central Pay Commission, stressed the need for anticipatory planning. “Energy cannot play catch-up. Energy has to anticipate,” he said, calling for integration of data across petroleum, power, coal and gas sectors to improve macroeconomic forecasting and infrastructure planning.

Addressing a session on 'Leveraging artificial intelligence in the upstream sector', Rajarshi Gupta, Managing Director and CEO of ONGC Videsh Ltd., said that India is undergoing a fundamental transformation in how exploration data is generated, shared and utilised. He emphasised the importance of collaboration and breaking institutional silos to unlock the value of AI-driven decision-making.

In the session on 'The solar and wind opportunity: Realising the dual potential of scaling India’s renewables', Santosh Kumar Sarangi, Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said that India must move beyond capacity addition and focus on grid integration and domestic manufacturing. He noted that non-fossil fuel-based installed capacity has reached about 267 GW.

At a leadership panel on Coal’s evolving role in a secure energy mix: charting a balanced and pragmatic approach, Vikram Dev Dutt, Secretary, Ministry of Coal, said that affordable and reliable baseload power remains essential as India works toward tripling per capita energy consumption, even while expanding renewable energy capacity.

During the Leadership Spotlight Session on 'Scaling Green Ammonia: Value Chain Synergies and the Hydrogen Ecosystem', Abhay Bakre, Mission Director of the National Green Hydrogen Mission, said that India’s green hydrogen ecosystem is moving from ambition to execution, supported by competitive renewable energy costs, policy certainty and growing international partnerships.

As the third day concluded, India Energy Week 2026 reaffirmed that the country’s energy transition would follow multiple coordinated pathways rather than a single model. Speakers stressed the need to balance growth with sustainability, innovation with reliability, and ambition with realism through policy certainty, data-driven decision-making and stakeholder collaboration.