In India, seven years ago, private-sector coal generators largely stopped building new power plants, fleeing massive losses and the looming threat of cheaper renewable power.

However, that seems to be changing. Companies including JSW Group Ltd., Essar Power Ltd., and Adani Power Ltd. are looking to invest in new and existing plants, Reuters reported. That’s an object lesson in the power of state intervention to skew markets away from cheap, clean power toward costly, fossil-fired incumbent businesses.

A few years back, not many people would have predicted such an outcome. Slumping costs for solar and rising deployment of panels caused coal power generation in India to peak between 2025 and 2027, with overall impacts stretching from the mining and utilities industries to India’s railways, shipping, and engineering businesses, consultants KPMG wrote in a July 2017 study.Those cost reductions have been even more surprising than analysts were predicting back then – but deployments haven’t kept pace. As a consequence, a return to coal seems increasingly likely.

Far from peaking, as KPMG forecast, the government now expects coal demand to rise by about 50% between now and 2030 when it’s set to reach 1.5 billion metric tons. If renewables do not get built, that may be the only way to avoid blackouts and meet the country’s inevitably rising power demand.