At the Financial Times’ organised Energy Transition Summit India, Vedanta Resources’ CEO Deshnee Naidoo offered a tempered but confident take on the world’s shifting energy landscape. Speaking to the Financial Times, Naidoo reflected on the complexity of the moment — a time, as she put it, when the global conversation around energy transition is “in a state of emergency,” yet perhaps not as bleak as it appears.
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Naidoo argued that despite the apparent policy back-pedalling in some economies, underlying momentum remains intact. “I'd like to say that maybe you can take a step back, maybe it's not all lost right now in terms of what's happening,” she said, noting that much of the groundwork for the green transition — from renewable projects to investment pipelines — continues to advance quietly beneath political noise.
Turning to the United States and China, Naidoo struck a pragmatic note. She acknowledged the awkward duality in global policy-making — a push in some quarters to prolong fossil-fuel roles, alongside large-scale industrial moves toward clean technology — but stressed that many projects have momentum. “I think the good news is, despite the fossil fuel friendly rhetoric we are seeing coming in the US right now, those projects are still going ahead,” she said, framing the policy noise as less decisive than the capital and supply-chain momentum already underway.
That momentum, she argued, is visible in India’s own numbers and policy choices. India’s renewable rollout, driven by both central targets and ministerial ambition, is already remaking the country’s energy mix. “India is growing its GDP, knowing that it's going to go green in doing it,” Naidoo said, emphasising that economic transformation and energy transition are now joined at the hip for New Delhi. Yet she was equally blunt about realism: for a country still scaling power and industrial capacity, coal remains the back-stop. “As with companies like ourselves who have a base load coming from coal, coal will still be the base load,” she said, before noting starkly that “India will continue to use about a billion and a half tons of coal right now,” even as renewables scale rapidly toward the government’s 2030 targets.
To add context: by June 2025 India’s installed renewable energy capacity had grown to approximately 226.8 GW, up nearly three times from around 76.4 GW in March 2014. And in the first half of 2025, India’s non-hydro renewable output surged 24.4 per cent to about 134.4 billion kWh, according to government data. This progress exists side-by-side with coal continuing to account for around 79 per cent of the country’s total domestic energy supply in FY 2023-24.
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