If the first two days of India Energy Week 2026 tested the conference’s premise in real time, the final stretch expanded it. Day 1 and Day 2 had been anchored by three signals: investment as the enabler, addition as the operating principle, and growth as the underlying driver. Day 3 and Day 4 sharpened to a key insight: India’s energy transition is being planned as a coordinated build-out across fuels, infrastructure, data systems and domestic capability – not a single pathway, and not a single timeline.
The second half of the programme took that framing into execution questions: what has to be built, what has to be integrated, and what has to remain affordable as systems scale.
Day 3: Building the Conditions for Scale
The focus shifted to system readiness: integrated planning, domestic capability, and sequencing across multiple pathways.
At the Leadership Spotlight session Scaling Green Ammonia: Value Chain Synergies and the Hydrogen Ecosystem, Abhay Bakre, Mission Director, National Green Hydrogen Mission, framed 2025-27 as the decisive window for the ecosystem to scale. “These three years – 2025, 2026 and 2027 – are very important for the ecosystem to actually act as a launchpad,” he said, adding that green hydrogen and ammonia prices are approaching parity with conventional alternatives – a prerequisite for domestic adoption and credible export competitiveness.
In parallel, the renewables conversation has shifted from capacity targets to the conditions that hold up those targets in practice. At The Solar and Wind Opportunity: Realising the Dual Potential of Scaling India’s Renewables Outlook, MNRE Secretary Santosh Kumar Sarangi said future policy focus must extend beyond installation to grid integration, distributed renewable management, and domestic manufacturing across solar and wind value chains. He noted India’s non-fossil capacity is now around 267 GW, with a target of over 600 GW by FY 2030.
On the Resilience stage, that logic flowed into coal. At Coal’s Evolving Role in a Secure Energy Mix: Charting a Balanced and Pragmatic Approach, Vikram Dev Dutt, Secretary, Ministry of Coal, put it plainly: “Coal is not going away in a hurry. For India, affordable and dependable baseload power is not a choice, it is an imperative. The mantra is not ‘phase out’, it is ‘phase down’ in calibrated steps that reflect ground realities,” he said.
On the Addition Stage, a different constraint surfaced: planning lag. At 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, Eighth Central Pay Commission, warned against reactive policymaking. “Energy cannot play catch-up. Energy has to anticipate. If we falter even once in planning energy for GDP growth, it becomes a constraint,” he said, calling for integrated data across petroleum, power, coal and gas to support forecasting and infrastructure prioritisation.
At the Global Energy Conclave, Secretary MoPNG Neeraj Mittal returned to the same underlying pressure: “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,” he said, noting ethanol blending has risen from 1.4% in 2014 to nearly 20% today.
Turning Strategy Into Supply Chains
As the programme deepened, it became clear that India Energy Week was also functioning as a working platform for alignment. The country sessions, roundtables and bilateral tracks made concrete moves from broad intent to targeted cooperation – focused on supply chains, deployment pathways and long-term market integration.
The India-Netherlands session on clean energy ecosystems reflected this deployment-first approach. Discussions spanned green hydrogen, CCUS, renewables and biofuels, but centred on practical enablers: last-mile export channels, hydrogen corridors and receiving stations, electrolyser manufacturing, and pilot projects across desalination, microgrids and membrane technology. Interest from Dutch firms extended beyond investment into R&D collaboration, scale-up and catalyst innovation, with India positioning itself as both a manufacturing and engineering base.
The India-Japan roundtable similarly blended conventional and emerging priorities. While strengthening hydrocarbon trade and investment remained central, the conversation expanded into biofuels, low-carbon fuels and operational efficiency, with opportunities identified across digitalisation, AI-enabled predictive analytics, instrumentation and SCADA systems to improve performance across the energy value chain.
The India-Iceland roundtable was narrower in scope but explicitly deployment-oriented, focusing on geothermal energy and carbon management. Discussions highlighted pilot opportunities, India’s untapped geothermal potential, and the readiness of Indian public sector companies pursuing early CCS projects.
A U.S.-India energy partnership roundtable, positioned as a follow-up to IEW 2025, reinforced the same pattern at scale. Alongside discussions on expanding hydrocarbon trade and LNG cooperation, the dialogue extended to equity participation in LNG projects, critical minerals and technology partnerships in CCUS and hydrogen – signalling a longer-term view of energy cooperation beyond spot trade.
In parallel, a series of MoUs and agreements signed across 28-29 January translated these conversations into bankable, near-term execution. Together, they reflected the week’s underlying logic: energy transition is being built through supply-chain alignment, offtake creation and incremental technology deployment rather than single, transformative bets.
These included collaborations between Indian Oil and ENGIE on LNG and gas trading in the Asia-Pacific; OIL, NRL and TotalEnergies on LNG sourcing and regasification knowledge-sharing; HPCL and Thermax on commercialising clean-energy technologies such as AEM electrolysers and CO2 capture; BPCL’s partnerships with DHL and Delhivery to convert logistics fleets to LNG; and BPCL and Praj’s plan for a commercial Bio-IBA demonstration plant at the Bargarh refinery.
Day 4: Proving Capacity, Setting Direction
Before the final fireside, the closing day leaned into something the week had been building toward across the exhibition floor and thematic zones: India Energy Week as a live showcase of execution capability.
That emphasis came through most clearly in the awards programme, which placed innovation and delivery alongside policy and capital as core transition enablers. Startups, academic teams and established enterprises were recognised not for ideas alone, but for technologies and solutions already moving toward deployment.
Under AVINYA – The Energy Startup Challenge, Minimines Cleantech Solutions was named winner for its proprietary process enabling low-carbon recovery of high-value materials from end-of-life lithium-ion batteries, with applications extending to solar panels, catalytic converters and permanent magnets. Other recognised startups reflected the same execution focus, spanning wastewater-to-hydrogen processes, AI-driven fibre sensing for monitoring pipelines, vents and CCUS systems, AI-led exploration tools, and robotic inspection solutions for hydrocarbon facilities.
The VASUDHA – Overseas Upstream Startup Challenge highlighted upstream technology innovation, with Netherlands-based SENERGETICS recognised for AI-driven corrosion monitoring solutions, and Resermine Inc. (USA) awarded runner-up for reservoir engineering optimisation tools. Academic participation was folded into the same delivery frame through the hackathon challenge, with IIT Bombay named winner for Aura, an AI-driven unified reservoir analysis platform, and IIT Delhi recognised for a circular-economy approach using CO2 capture and mineralisation via steel industry slag.
At enterprise scale, the FIPI / IIP Annual Industry Awards reinforced the same message. Recognition spanned exploration, production, refining, innovation, pipeline transport, city gas distribution and oil marketing – including awards for ONGC, Oil India, Reliance Industries’ Jamnagar SEZ refinery, IndianOil’s R&D division and MRPL’s Innovation Center – signalling that execution capability is being built across the full value chain, not only at the margins.
The closing ceremony fireside chat then returned the focus to policy and accountability. Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri argued that geopolitical volatility is no longer episodic but structural, and that India’s response has been diversification and accelerated adoption of cleaner fuels without compromising affordability. “I think we’ve coped very well. Each challenge has been converted into an opportunity – both in terms of diversification of sources of supply and a very fast transitioning on green fuels – 1.4% to 20% on ethanol, a big push on CBG, green hydrogen, etc.”
He linked that approach to India’s position in global energy markets, describing the country as the “third largest consumer, fourth largest refiner, fifth largest exporter,” before returning to consumer outcomes as the ultimate test. “Today we have one of the lowest energy prices in the world. Global turmoil or uncertainty has never been passed on to the consumer.”
Secretary, MoPNG, Neeraj Mittal added that the government’s focus remains on strengthening domestic exploration and production, building scale across refining and petrochemicals, and using technology and digitalisation to improve resilience and lower costs – alongside targeted efforts to expand cleaner fuels such as compressed biogas through state participation and biomass-linked supply chains.
Viksit Bharat 2047: What It Takes to Power a Growth Economy
If Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s opening remarks positioned India as a centre of gravity in global energy demand and a competitive destination for capital and partnerships, the end of the week made clear what sits underneath that proposition. Energy demand will rise sharply, and the transition will be judged by whether India can build system capacity fast enough – across fuels, grids, clean molecules and domestic supply chains – while keeping affordability intact.
That is why the conference repeatedly returned to the same organising logic. This was not a contest between fuels or technologies. It was a question of throughput: how quickly infrastructure can be built, how reliably it can operate, and how affordably it can scale across a large, diverse and fast-growing economy.
The OPEC World Oil Outlook presentation earlier in the week grounded that reality in numbers. India is projected to add 8.2 million barrels per day of oil demand by 2050, with primary energy demand expected to nearly double over the same period. Oil, gas and renewables were presented not as substitutes, but as complementary components of a balanced system.
What India Energy Week’s four stages – Collaboration, Resilience, Transition and Addition – offered this year was a practical structure for navigating that build-out. It provided space for investment and partnerships to form, for technologies and innovations to be tested against real constraints, and for trade-offs to be acknowledged rather than smoothed over. The scale of the platform reflected that role. As noted at the closing ceremony, the event brought together 75,000 energy professionals, more than 700 exhibitors and over 550 speakers across four days, alongside a Technical Conference where 250-plus experts presented deployable solutions.
The ambition is well established. The pressure is rising. What makes India distinctive – and why the world is watching – is that it is attempting this transition at unmatched scale: growing its economy, expanding energy access, improving quality of life for more than 1.4 billion people, and doing so under tight affordability constraints.
If India can build cleaner, more resilient energy systems while keeping energy accessible and competitive, it will not only meet its own Viksit Bharat 2047 goals; it will set a benchmark for how energy transitions can work in growth economies. As the week repeatedly made clear, execution – at Indian scale – is the only outcome that ultimately counts.
Note to the Reader: This article has been produced on behalf of the brand by HT Brand Studio and does not have journalistic/editorial involvement of Hindustan Times.
