In our eighth TEA Break episode, Dr Priyadarshini Karve talks about her varied career. Beginning as a physicist, she’s since worked on improved cook stoves, climate education, and decentralised renewable energy. She discusses some of the barriers to a sustainable energy transition in India, including a lack of familiarity with renewable energy technologies, climate literacy, and ensuring energy justice not just energy security.
‘TEA Breaks’ is a series where we chat to our experts on the TEA@SUNRISE project about Transforming Energy Access (TEA) and next-generation solar. Join us for 10-20 minutes with a cup of tea (or beverage of your choice) as we discuss the challenges and opportunities of renewable energy transitions.
Transcript:
Sara Walters (SW): Hello, I’m Sara and welcome to TEA Breaks, a series where we talk to our experts on the TEA@SUNRISE project about next generation solar and transforming energy access.
So today I’m very delighted to welcome Dr Priyadarshini Karve. Priya holds a PhD in Physics and has over 25 years’ experience in renewable energy and climate action. She has co-founded two green enterprises in India, teaches as a visiting faculty member and has received several national and international awards.
In 2023, she was recognised among 75 Indian women science luminaries by the Ministry of Science and Technology. So thank you Priya. It’s great to have the opportunity to speak with you.
Q1: Can you tell us about your background and expertise?
SW: So I’d like to ask you the first question, please can you tell us about yourself and your area of expertise?
Priyadarshini Karve (PK): Sure. And thank you for giving me this opportunity.
So I’m a physicist by training, I have a PhD in physics and I worked in material science. I worked on diamond thin films, but after that I didn’t really do any hardcore physics as such, so I got into designing improved cook stoves. I have worked on the technology for converting agriculture waste into biochar.
I had a proprietary consulting firm which is my own thing called Samuchit Envirotech through which we try to help Indian rural NGOs primarily to implement technological solutions and also a little bit of work on climate literacy in both urban and rural India.
I also am currently heading a couple of NGO networks in India. One is focused on decentralised renewable energy called Clean Energy Access Network and the other is Indian Network on Ethics and Climate Change, which is more about climate action in India. So these are some of the things that I’m doing.
Plus I also teach in a local liberal arts college, undergraduate college, which has nothing to do with physics really, but more about the climate change, sustainability, those type of courses.
SW: Very busy then.
PK: Yeah, that’s true.
Q2: What are some of the biggest barriers to people adopting more sustainable practices?
SW: So what are some of the biggest barriers you see when people want to adopt sort of more sustainable practices? What would you say?
PK: So it is more of a familiarity kind of an issue, like if you don’t see many people using something around you, then there is a hesitation whether the technology actually works or not. So that is the one main barrier.
And then I mean, especially when it comes to sustainable technologies in the rural context, cost can be a big barrier. But in the Indian context, that is not really a huge barrier now. I mean, mostly even rural people own cell phones and even smartphones. So cost is not really a barrier. So it’s the psychological barrier of whether this technology work? Will it work for me? Will they do the things that I need to do? And why aren’t other people using it yet? Those are the kind of issues.
SW: Yeah, yeah. Thank you.
Q3: What first motivated you to work in this area?
SW: So what would you say first motivated you to work in this area?
PK: So it’s sort of happened by chance. When I was doing my bachelor’s degree with physics specialisation or for the last final year, I had to do a project. So for that project, I worked with the NGO that my father was heading at that time and the only physics focused work that they were doing there was around improved cook stoves.
So I worked in that lab for three months, worked on a cook stove design. And in those three months I inhaled so much smoke that I suddenly had this realisation that rural women who are cooking on traditional stoves day in and day out for years, how much they must be suffering.
So it was sort of that, and the fact that I was using physics to improve the cook stove design and that was going to address a gender and social problem. So that was something which fascinated me. The physics challenge – because I mean if you put petrol in a diesel engine it will not work. If you are designing a space rocket, you have a very standardised fuel and then you design for that.
But when you are designing a cook stove, your fuel is going to be variable, but you have to cook the same amount of food in the same amount of time. So sometimes you will be using firewood, sometimes cow dung cake, sometimes agricultural waste and still your heat output has to be the same. So in that sense it is a bigger challenge to design a cook stove than to design even a spaceship. So that was that was the other part of it.
Because at that time cook stoves, kind of carbon funding was also going on for cook stoves. So that pulled me into climate conversations. So that is what got me into trying to understand what climate change means from an Indian perspective. Nobody in India at that time was talking about it. And then the decentralised renewable energy sector as a whole, I interacted with many people there. So that’s how sort of one thing led to another. That’s how it happened.
Q4: What kept you motivated to continue working in this field?
SW: Yeah, yeah. So, this is a follow up really to that. What kept you motivated to continue working in this, you know, in this field, this area?
PK: In 2007, I got my first opportunity to teach in a liberal arts institution and I designed the course for Living with Climate Change. And at that time in India, nobody was even talking about climate change, it was some western problem that western people are going to solve, kind of feeling was there.
But I was interacting with international community and even in India, farming communities, fishing communities that started experiencing the impacts. I was talking with NGOs. So that led me to design a carbon footprint calculator for urban Indians because when it comes to cities in India, we who are living in the cities are contributing to climate change and we are also facing the impacts being in a developing country. So I felt that it is high time we started having these conversations.
So that is what led me to start having workshops and talking to people about what is their understanding of climate change, what do they think about the solutions. And then those conversations because of the geopolitics and all also started growing. So it was a lot of things were happening and I suddenly found myself in the middle of that.
Around the 2010s, a lot of conversation and in fact policy started coming in trying to shift towards solar and wind energy for electricity generation. But in India most of the conversation focused around large scale systems and some of us felt that we actually should be focusing on localised decentralised systems because it is an opportunity.
It’s not that, I mean if it’s coal-fired power plants, we were producing a lot of electricity, but still there was a huge gap between electricity supplied to cities versus electricity supplied to rural areas. So we felt that with renewables there is an opportunity that you can produce electricity where you need it. And therefore if there is focus on decentralisation, then we can bring in not just energy security but also energy justice.
So some of us started advocating that. And I was part of that group, although I haven’t directly worked in solar as I mean as an R&D thing, but I have always supported solar decentralised applications for a variety of local needs.
Basically, I mean, all these intellectual debates. That is what is the biggest motivator.
Q5: How can we make climate information easier to understand and use in everyday life?
SW: Yeah, I think that’s sort of, you’ve touched on that, so leading into my next question about climate literacy. How can we make climate information easier to understand and use in everyday life? I think you touched on that, a little bit of your work in this, etcetera.
PK: So in fact, that was the question which plagued me when I started talking to people because it’s a complex phenomenon, climate change. Even understanding the science is difficult for people because carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is there in the atmosphere. And everybody learns in school that plants use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. So how can it be something which is bad? So making that distinction.
And also it is not a very clear-cut link that global warming is happening and therefore these are the impacts. It’s not very immediate. It’s a very slow process and the emissions are happening somewhere else, but the impacts happen somewhere else. So even understanding the scientific intricacies was difficult, and then understanding the politics of climate change is even more complicated.
So as I said, I designed the calculator to start. So where an urban Indian upper middle-class person can actually find out how much is my contribution to global warming. And that is not a small contribution because urban Indians, I mean, the lifestyle is increasingly becoming more and more energy intensive.
So in India, we have always only quoted the average numbers that the per capita emissions are this much and therefore we are not part of the problem, but urban Indians are part of the problem. So that was the point I was trying to drive home and it worked. I mean, even in the course that I was teaching, two of my students who used to come to the college on motorcycles suddenly shifted to bicycles after doing this exercise.
So I realised that when a number comes up that this is my contribution, then people start thinking about, OK, that now what can I do to reduce that? So then we started suggesting climate action to people.
So I feel that there are these types of things where, you know, by lecturing at people you are not going to convey the information, but developing that self-awareness that, OK, I’m part of the problem, but I can also be part of the solution. So what do I do now? So that is the kind of conversations that we try to organise here locally.
SW: Yeah, great.
Q6: What shaped your interdisciplinary career?
SW: So talking about your career then, so it’s brought together physics, entrepreneurship, community needs, climate justice. What has shaped this journey, this interdisciplinary journey for you Priya? Do you have does one take a priority? If that’s or do you know, do you have a preferred direction? Do you know, just?
PK: I was fortunate that I belong to a very progressive family, so I had that freedom that and also we were financially pretty well off. So it was not essential for me to, you know, have a high paying job so that I had a family to support or anything like that. So I think that privilege and the freedom to choose whatever I want to do. So that has been a key factor, I feel, because then whatever sort of excited me intellectually, I could just pursue that.
And somehow things have connected to each other. So that ‘interdisciplinariness’ is not planned. It has just evolved. Yeah, it has evolved on its own.
You know, the priority, well, I work on various things, but the priority I would say is on science in a way that, the scientific way of thinking. So even whatever work I’m doing in energy or environment, I’m also involved in local environmental movements. I keep on saying this to people that don’t do this because of emotional involvement, but do this with a clear understanding that this is the science and this is where we need humanity to move forward to from a very rational perspective.
Because I’ll just give you one example. There is this whole idea that we should plant a lot of trees. And there’s a huge misconception in people’s mind that the oxygen in the atmosphere is because of the trees, whereas the origin of the oxygen in the atmosphere is before trees even evolved on Earth. It is from blue-green bacteria, which are there in the oceans. But that I find, I mean, people keep on saying to me that OK, this is a misconception, but because of that misconception, if people are protective of trees, what is wrong in it? But when that misconception then breaks, then what? Then people will stop protecting the trees. So they should protect the trees for the correct reasons, for scientifically accurate reasons, which will be more sustainable. So that that approach is the priority for them.
SW: Yeah, yeah. Ok, thank you.
Q7: Have you made any new collaborations or contacts through the TEA@SUNRISE network?
SW: So I think we first met on the original SUNRISE programme. So I think we’ve been acquainted for quite a long time. So, and obviously now you’re a member of the TEA@SUNRISE network. Just very briefly, Priya, have you made any new collaborations or contacts through the network? Is there anything you, you know, you’d like to share? You may not, but yeah.
PK: So not directly collaboration I said, because as I said, I don’t directly work in solar photovoltaics full time, but somebody who is interested in renewable energy and decentralised renewable energy. I have found the conversations very stimulating and learning about what new technologies are coming up because TEA@SUNRISE is basically about future next-generation solar photovoltaics and something which can be manufactured locally even in middle income countries.
So that is that resonates with my own understanding that decentralised renewable energy is the way to move forward, not just to address climate change, but also to build a world which is more just in terms of energy access.
And if we can, I mean, if this effort through the SUNRISE programme can really bring in the energy sovereignty as well as energy justice to medium and low-income countries, that will have a huge positive impact on the geopolitics also, I feel.
So from that perspective, I very much am a cheerleader of this programme, you know, and as I said, the conversations are always very stimulating and the new things I learned helps sort of convince me that my thinking is also on the right track.
SW: Yeah, well, but that’s a great end to our, I think chat, which has been really, really nice. And I’ve enjoyed listening to your history, your story, you know, where you started, where you are now. And so, yeah, I just want to say really appreciate you sharing your journey and the lessons you’ve learned along the way, your highlights of bringing together science, communities and collaboration to address some of today’s biggest challenges.
So good luck, Priya.
PK: Thank you.
SW: Keep going with the network, keep in contact. And yeah, great to chat with you. Thank you.
PK: Thank you. Thanks a lot.