Easwaran Narassimhan awarded $350,000 grant from Stichting SED Fund
Assistant Professor of Climate and Energy Policy Easwaran Narassimhan has been awarded a $350,000 grant from the Stichting SED Fund to lead a team that will address green industrial policy and climate-positive development in India.
Grants like the Stichting SED Fund provide critical resources for teams to transform policy efforts into implemented practices all over the world. Narassimhan’s work, which is a project of The Fletcher School’s Climate Policy Lab, will focus on mapping India’s clean energy efforts with the proposed national goal of carbon neutrality by 2070.
“We live in a world of great power competition, where a lot of inputs to produce clean energy are exactly the technologies and raw materials that great powers are competing for, whether it's rare earth minerals, semiconductors, or other technologies that help with producing clean energy components,” Narassimhan said.
“Global clean energy value chains have been disrupted significantly post-COVID—not just because of COVID, but also because of a conscious effort from Western countries to diversify their supply chain dependence on China,” he added. “That has motivated efforts to on-shore some of the economic benefits of the energy transition by creating jobs locally in Western countries themselves to sell climate action as an economic opportunity for their own citizens.”
Against this backdrop, Narassimhan’s team will focus on how green industrial policy can inform climate positive development in India.
India’s Response to Climate Change
India has set a target to reach net-zero in carbon emissions by 2070. Implementing clean energy systems and products at such a large scale requires funding, research, development, and a sophisticated approach to governance.
“India has done really well in terms of deploying clean energy and accelerating the deployment of renewable energy in the last decade,” Narassimhan explained. “However, it has struggled to capitalize economically on the transition that has unfolded due to relatively low levels of clean tech manufacturing in the country for all sorts of reasons.”
India will have to deploy close to 50 gigawatts of renewables every year to meet their net zero target, and current domestic manufacturing capacity is not sufficient to ensure that India avoids dependency on major players like China, which currently produces most of the country’s solar power components. Finding answers to questions of energy security is thus essential.
From Goal Setting to Implementation
Narassimhan and his team have already completed a modeling study, which found a few possible low-carbon development pathways that can lead India to net-zero by 2070. The models also suggest there will be significant economic upside for the country, creating more jobs and GDP than business as usual.
India will have to implement the right sets of policies for this structural transformation, though. Narassimhan’s team will focus on implementation gap analysis to bridge the potential divide between structural implementation and governance. India’s federal government structure is also of interest to Narassimhan as the project kicks off.
“India is a federal country like the United States,” he said. “States have the power to decide how their economies should be structured and operated.”
Studying the players within India will be critical to the project, and regional success stories can provide important data. Narassimhan hopes the research that emerges from this project will illuminate bright opportunities for India.
“Our hope is to identify India's green competitive advantage going forward,” he said. “No country can implement good, strategic, industrial policy and structural transformation policies without understanding their potential comparative advantage in the future. Most countries—particularly late industrializers like India—operate under scarce resource constraints.”
With Narassimhan at the helm, this grant stands to aid India in exploring a green growth model where the country emerges as crucial hub of clean energy manufacturing for other states undergoing large-scale energy transitions.
Cutting-Edge Research at the Climate Policy Lab
Professor Narassimhan’s project with the Stichting SED Fund will continue for two years. His team is looking for students who want to explore these large questions through extensive research. Fletcher students eager to understand climate change through evolving global economies, new technologies, policy, and beyond will have the opportunity to hone a competitive advantage in a changing job market.
“A lot of organizations—not just think tanks, but also multilateral organizations and government agencies—are trying to figure this out,” Narassimhan said.
“In this rapidly changing global climate and trade landscape, how do we operate?” he added. “How can countries make sure that they can be ambitious, undergo the energy transition, and derive some economic benefits for their citizens? These are the large questions that everyone's asking. Students who are interested in engaging in these topics will benefit a lot.”
Read more about Fletcher’s Climate Policy Lab. Select published research by Narassimhan includes, “What Shapes Green Industrial Policy Objectives and Design? A Comparative Policy Analysis of Renewable Energy Auctions in India and South Africa” in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice.