Penn’s Carnot Prize for electrifying India’s villages |
India’s Energy Minister Piyush Goyal — who directed a fast-track effort to electrify 18,000 villages in remote parts of India — is this year’s recipient of the Carnot Prize, awarded by the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Goyal, the fourth recipient of the award, will receive the honor at a special ceremony Oct.19. Goyal is the former minister of power and renewables and current minister of railways and coal. Minister Goyal’s efforts demonstrate what it takes to create a just energy transition—courage amidst complexity, said Mark Alan Hughes, founding faculty director of the Kleinman Center. Providing power to the world’s energy poor turns on the lights—and also empowers education, sanitation, and health care. It closes the gap between the haves and have nots, said Hughes. The International Energy Agency reports that in the year 2000, less than half of India’s population had access to electricity. Now, more than 80 percent of the population has access to electricity. If this pace continues, India will have universal electrification by 2020, ‘one of the largest successes in the history of electrification,’ noted the IEA.
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