[shripadk]

> Regardless of whether hypocracy is involved, wanting India and China to avoid the mistakes the West made is entirely reasonable. If nothing else, the US and Europe built coal plants before better technologies were available. India has access to modern natural gas plants, fuel cells, wind, solar, etc if it wants them. No one would suggest that India or China build lots of steam engines, after all.

Building steam engines and maintaining them was more expensive than building fuel based / electric trains. Even the initial cost was less. So the transition was faster and made a lot of economic sense.

Solar energy prices dropped to around parity with coal for the first time this year, hitting 4.34 rupees (about 6 US cents) a kilowatt-hour (kWh), while coal tariffs range usually range in between 3–5 rupees/kWh (about 5–8 US cents). It wasn't possible until April of this year to even consider Solar a viable alternative. With prices dropping (and hopefully continuing to drop until at least 2030) we can now think of installing new power plants backed by solar.

However, what happens to the old coal based power plants that power 20% of Indian populace (that is close to 3/4th of the population of the United States)? It is going to be super expensive to transition those old power plants to solar. Also, what about 24/7 power? Solar power plants don't guarantee 24/7 power. So you can't completely get rid of coal plants anyways. India has to do quite a bit of balancing act to provide energy for it's 1.3 billion and growing population.

It's not as easy as you make it out to be. If that was the case, United States would have already transitioned to 100% clean energy like it did with steam engines in the 19th-20th century.