Inevitable Ep 105: Varun Sivaram, Senior Visiting Fellow at Columbia University's Center for Global Energy Policy
May 25, 2020
51:41
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