While India is committed to promoting environmental sustainability, it is struggling to balance such goals with its pursuit of economic growth. The country suffers from energy poverty, with large populations lacking access to modern power sources and dependent instead on wood, biomass and other non-conventional fuels for their basic needs. Lack of access to modern energy impacts people’s health and quality of life, environment, and the country’s overall economic productivity and development. To provide modern energy to its population and meet existing demand gap, India needs to upscale its energy production. Domestic coal reserves provide the cheapest source of energy supply but climate change concerns require alternative, lower carbon strategies.

Financial and structural implications of transitioning from a coal-based economy to renewables are huge, which necessitates support from international communities as well as strong policy interventions from national governments. To understand the imperative policy and institutional support for such transitions, it is worthwhile to analyse the history of past energy transitions. This paper extracts the factors and processes of historical energy transition in the US and England, from wood.

• Energy
• Sustainable Development
• India

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