Innovation Frontlines International Energy Agency

In the season’s nine preceding episodes, some of India’s brightest energy entrepreneurs told the stories of how they are trailblazing a narrow path from research lab to market. We learned what it is taking to successfully disrupt different parts of the energy system, and what key factors are helping or hindering energy transitions in India. In this season finale, recorded in July 2022, we reflect on five key lessons from the interviews with founders in the company of three influential thinkers with deep relevant experience. Padmaja Ruparel (co-founder of founding partner of India Angel Network and founding partner at IAN Fund), Mihir Sharma (Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi and also a Bloomberg Opinion columnist) and Akshat Rathi (Senior Reporter for Climate at Bloomberg News and author of the weekly Net Zero newsletter. We are also joined by Professor Ajay Sood, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India and Chairperson of the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology & Innovation Advisory Council for a view from the government on clean energy innovation in India.

One of the main objectives of the IEA is to distil insights about the world around us that enable governments to make better decisions on matters of energy security, access and clean energy transitions. Innovation Frontlines has sought to bring to the surface new insights that can help accelerate clean energy innovation in India. We therefore hope that the interviews provide a useful resource for anyone interested in clean energy innovation, technology, policy and entrepreneurship. We’d love to have listeners’ feedback and reviews as we consider the regions and topics the IEA could cover next. You’ll find us on Twitter at @siddharth3 and @sijbennett or by email at info@iea.org.

In India, well over a million people are estimated to die every year due to air pollution, making it one of India’s most acute environmental problems. In particular, pollution from agricultural residue burning can contribute to anywhere up to half the pollutants in the air at specific times of the year. Farmers have short windows of time between their two crops cycles to remove residues from the previous harvest, and often resort to burning it. But what if this so-called stubble could be quickly processed instead into a fuel or other commodity? That is the challenge taken up by Vidyut Mohan and the team at Takachar. In this episode, we speak to Vidyut about their affordable device for thermally treating the stubble on smallholder farms. He talks about moving to Europe and how a chance meeting with a fellow researcher in the United States eventually led to the manufacturing plant they have now established in Bengaluru. We get into what they have learned from on-the-ground projects in Delhi and Tamil Nadu, as well as how an unexpected development in the global climate discussion – mushrooming appetite for low-costs carbon removal solutions – has recently transformed the fundraising outlook for Takachar.

In climate discussions, India’s agricultural sector is often highlighted in terms of the likely climate impacts to the sector – due to heat waves and floods – but it is also a significant consumer of fossil fuels. Around 15% of India’s overall electricity demand comes from agriculture. Structural problems, including small land-holdings and a lack of adequate returns, make it hard to shift to cleaner sources of energy, even in cases where solar power could free up resources and improve livelihoods. Through Khetwork’s groundbreaking work on high-efficiency irrigation pumps, Victor Lesniewski is working to decarbonise agricultural energy use in the agriculture sector and also make farmers more productive to increase their revenues through the year. He and his co-founder Katie Taylor (who we also talk to in this episode about gender- and culture-related challenges for clean energy entrepreneurs) produce solar pump systems for smallholders that target the dry-season, when kerosene pumps are most costly. They share what they have learned about relocating a technology solution from Massachusetts to Maharashtra, why efficiency is key to reducing capital costs, and how to bring sceptical customers on board. When this conversation was recorded in May 2022 they had reached a production capacity of 120 pumps per week, and looking at financing options for further scale-up in an environment of rising input costs.

The importance of energy efficiency cannot be overstated. IEA’s Executive Director Dr. Fatih Birol frequently refers to energy efficiency as the “first fuel”, since it represents the cleanest and often, the cheapest way to meet our energy needs. As per IEA’s scenarios, after renewables, energy efficiency offers the second greatest potential to reduce carbon emissions in our economies. If India were to pursue its pathway to net zero emissions by 2070, nearly one third of the emissions avoided by 2040 compared to the current pathway could come from energy efficiency alone. To discuss one aspect of energy efficiency – that related to residential energy consumption – we speak with Soumya Bhattacharya, the Co-founder and CFO of SustLabs, an energy efficiency solutions provider based in Mumbai since 2016. We focus in particular on SustLabs’ Ohm Assistant, which is a device that clips onto the cables near your residential electricity meter and constantly reads the frequencies of electricity being drawn into a home with a very high level of precision. This enables consumers access information they need most to make decisions that help improve energy efficiency at home. Our conversation with Soumya focuses on a range of issues including the innovation challenge that they undertook, the learning curve that their consumers have to deal with, the scale of SustLabs’ operations currently, and their ambitions for the future.

In 2019, India achieved a historic landmark of reaching near-universal household connectivity to electricity, meaning that over 900 million citizens have gained an electric connection to their households in the past two decades. However, power outages continue in large parts of the country. In some areas, such outages can last for several hours on a daily basis. Deploying renewable energy quickly in these communities would help address a range of issues, including air pollution from the use of backup generators as well as energy inequity and female participation in the workforce. Savitha Sridharan founded Orora Global in 2014 as a social enterprise with a technological solution: the Orora PowerHub. This product can combines solar photovoltaics and batteries in different configurations to in a couple of innovative ways to meet the specific needs of low-income communities in India. Today, Orora is helping to cheaply power sewing machines, fridges and lighting to a path out of a cycle of poverty. This conversation, recorded in early March 2022, covers Savitha’s passions for engineering, social impact and running, as well as her successes in raising skills and capital in both India and the United States.

This week on Innovation Frontlines we speak to a serial innovator in the area of advanced materials for energy storage and mobility. In two decades, under the current pathway, India’s total vehicle stock could more than double, with cars and trucks increasing their share to about 45% of the vehicle stock and carbon dioxide emissions doubling by 2040 if we don’t change energy source. On a net zero by 2070 pathway, about 20% of India’s road vehicle stock will have to be electric by 2030. Akshay Singhal is founder and CEO of Log9 Materials, which has been applying its expertise in graphene to trial an audacious fuel cell system for road transport using electricity and aluminium, and also a way to fast charge more conventional battery packs. Akshay tells us how they identified the importance of tackling range and charging times for electric vehicle users and how they have built batteries, cars, 3-wheelers and chargers, all since being founded in 2015. This conversation was recorded in December 2021. Since then, Log9 has set up a new battery manufacturing facility and won Best Energy Start-up at the Economic Times Energy Leadership Awards.