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Coal smoke and mirrors reflect poorly on what's really happening

See if you can pick it. The economy-wide plan calls for a halt to new coal-fired generators and a tripling of renewable energy generation within five years to deliver 175GW of green power in a bid to clear the air and curb sky-rocketing greenhouse emissions.

South Australia? Denmark? China even? No. It's India.

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Turnbull opens the batting in India

It's time to take the India relationship to a new level, says Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, during a trip to the country.

But isn't India hungry for as much Australian coal as it can get with one of its companies, Adani, developing the world's largest coal mine in Queensland's Galilee Basin?

Yes, but that is only part of the India picture.

As Malcolm Turnbull meets with his counterpart, Narendra Modi, India is busily preparing for a clean(er) energy future that inevitably embraces abundant solar and wind possibilities.

Like most things in this enormous, complicated country, India's energy future is anything but straightforward. The Turnbull government, like the Abbott iteration that preceded it, has made a moral tale out of its planned coal exports to India, framing it in terms of Australian coal lifting 250 million ultra-poor and rural Indians out of darkness, with electricity for lighting, cooking, and heating, for the first time.

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It is no accident that this moral dimension is difficult to contest. Along with the obligatory exaggerations by the mine's proponents about local jobs, it has been a major element of the government's justification for the controversial Adani Carmichael Mine, even as the project struggles for backers, and relies on taxpayer-funded loans for critical infrastructure.

While it is true that India is a big emitter due to its extensive use of thermal coal-fired power, which meets 60-plus per cent of its energy consumption, the Modi government wants that to change - knows it must change.

And there are good economic reasons to believe it will, from the ongoing descent of solar power prices, to the high up-front capital costs of new electricity distribution to communities previously unserviced. For these remote areas, the financials of so-called distributed generation, such as roof-top solar, are favourable when compared to installing expensive baseload transmission infrastructure for relatively low-density communities.

The political left has often been accused of an "ideological" commitment to green energy, despite the greater costs and greater intermittency of renewables.

But in developing world mega-populations such as India, policy-makers and banks are turning that argument on its head. Not only do distributed renewables have the advantage of being cheap, they don't produce the air pollution that is increasingly harming politicians as well as human health.

While Donald Trump lauds the end of Barack Obama's war on coal, increasingly it is coal's supporters who can be seen as the true ideologues of the energy debate. Even here in India.

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