Ep 105: Varun Sivaram, Senior Visiting Fellow at Columbia University's Center for Global Energy Policy
Today's guest is Dr. Varun Sivaram, a Senior Visiting Fellow at Columbia University's Center for Global Energy Policy. Most recently, Varun was Chief Technology Officer for ReNew Power, India's largest renewable energy company, and was previously the director of the energy and climate program at the Council on Foreign Relations. TIME Magazine named him to its TIME 100 Next most influential people in the world, and he's also the author of the well-known book, "Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet." Varun’s experience is rare, in that he has lots of experience domestically and abroad, and also with both energy innovation and policy. We cover a lot of ground in this episode, and you won’t want to miss it! Enjoy the show. You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at [email protected], where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Inevitable · Jason Jacobs, Varun Sivaram
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Show Notes
In today’s episode, we cover:
- Varun’s wide-ranging background in academia, startups and public policy
- His career as a technologist beginning with Cleantech 1.0
- How he moved from science to public policy
- How cooperation across sectors is critical to solve climate change.
- The need for aggressive increases in federal funding for energy innovation
- The lessons of Cleantech 1.0
- How the missteps of VC cleantech investing offers insight into future funding models for climate companies
- How the complexities of climate change make it different from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program
- Varun’s three-prong prescription for addressing climate change
- How climate change in the U.S. should be couched and framed in terms of global competitiveness
- How funding needs to be robust enough to demonstrate new technologies
- How coordination between R&D and deployment needs to be the cornerstone of energy innovation policy
- Varun’s view that VC is not the right model for the new wave of climate innovation technologies
- How climate change priorities and challenges are distributed and regional
- How the influx of Silicon Valley talent into climate tech can be challenged by lack of domain knowledge
- How a “sector-switching” fellowship could help cross-pollinate talent across industries to address climate change
- The importance of India’s energy transition
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
- Bio at Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA: https://energypolicy.columbia.edu/dr-varun-sivaram
- “Taming The Sun”: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/taming-sun
- Nano Solar: http://www.nanosolar.com/
- Perovskite Solar Cells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perovskite_solar_cell
- AAAS Fellowship: https://www.aaas.org/fellowships
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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant