Union Minister for Railways and Commerce Piyush Goyal has announced that the entire network of railways in the country will run on electricity by 2024.
Union Minister for Railways and Commerce Piyush Goyal has announced that the entire network of railways in the country will run on electricity by 2024. “We are embarking on rapid electrification of the rail network by 2024, we expect the entire railways to be 100 percent run on electricity,” Goyal said while speaking at the India-Brazil Business Forum.
“It will be the first railway in the entire world, of this scale and size, to be run on electricity and by 2030, we plan to make the entire railway network a zero-emission network. It will run on clean energy,” he added.
He said, “India would love to partner with Brazil.”
In November 2019, the minister had previously apprised of this development after he had tweeted that the “Railways is continuously increasing electrification for a better, pollution-free future. The target of electrification of the entire railway in the next 3-4 years has been set, making it the world’s first carbon emission-free railway, along with that the railways are producing solar energy for their power needs.”
Prior to that the Railway Minister had said that Indian Railways will become the world’s first “net-zero” carbon emitter by 2030. “By 2030, we are working to make the Indian railways the world’s first net-zero railway. The Government is phasing out the old coal plants, which is going to help reduce environmental pollution, and will also create the demand for new plants and spur the investment cycle,” he had said while speaking at third India Energy Forum CERAWeek 2019.
More recently, in December 2019 Goyal had said that in a bid to go green, the Indian Railways has planned to source about 1 GW of solar energy and approximately 200 MW of wind energy progressively by 2021-22. The Indian Railways has set up 201 MW, including 98 MW from solar energy and 103 MW from wind power, till October 31, 2019.
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