Akshay Singhal, Log9 Materials

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.