Govt aims to bring down energy usage by 10% in 5 years: Goyal

New Delhi: The government aims to bring down energy consumption in the country by 10 percent in the next five years, Power Minister Piyush Goyal said today.

"As we increase our energy consumption from one trillion units to 2 trillion units, we will be looking at a saving of 200 billion units by bringing down transmission losses," Goyal said at a conference here today.

The Minister said that the government is looking at bringing down energy consumption by nearly 10 percent in next five years even as it faces challenges in electricity transmission and distribution.

Goyal, who also holds charge of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said that the government also plans to scale up the contribution of clean power.

"We are looking at scaling up share of renewable energy to 15 percent of 2 trillion units envisaged in the next five years," he said.

At present, renewable power accounts for six percent of the total one trillion units of electricity consumed.

Besides, the Minister said that the government plans to increase renewable power generation in the country substantially.

"As many as 60 billion units of renewable energy were produced last year, the effort is to scale it up to 300 billion units in the next 6-7 years, possibly advanced to five years," Goyal said.

The government has set a target of generating 1,75,000 MW of renewable power by 2022, of which 1,00,000 MW will come from solar power.