Publish Date: 2023-09-05 13:36:05
We are delighted to host a seminar by our very own Prof. Dr. Kaveri Iychettira on Wednesday, the 6th of September 2023, at noon. See details about the talk, and the speaker bio below. We look forward to seeing you there!
This talk will provide an overview into Dr. Iychettira's recently published work, and into her ongoing and future efforts towards informing India's low carbon transition.
Although integrating renewable energy now forms a fundamental component of decarbonisation strategies across the world, the challenge of balancing intermittency with flexible resources remains unresolved. A strongly advocated institutional solution is to implement market mechanisms which can incentivise investment and dispatch of flexible resources to address this challenge; such mechanisms, however, only been implemented with limited success in developing countries. This work examines both the premise and prescription of the argument to integrate renewable electricity in developing countries through elements of the liberalisation model (such as a wholesale spot market, or an independent system operator for dispatch), through a detailed literature review, and case studies of India and China. Her findings suggest that cost-recovery issues and distributional imperatives need to be addressed in order to implement markets or other institutions that can enable greater integration of renewables.
She builds on this work by identifying institutional challenges associated with implementing a regional or national market based economic dispatch scheme particularly in India. She further elucidates how the interests of the states and the union government complement or conflict each other in the application of a national market-based electricity dispatch scheme. This is achieved, using documentary evidence from the consultation process employed by the regulatory authorities, interviews, and a workshop. Furthermore, she uses this rich qualitative evidence to conduct an analysis of how values and value conflicts in the policy process can hinder or encourage policy change in socio-technical systems.
She will end the talk with an overview of her ongoing and future efforts with PhD and Master students, and external collaborations; for instance — a framework for scenario design and evaluation for India's Net Zero pathways, incorporating behavioural realism in investment decisions with an ABM, modelling political economy and governance challenges in the power sector using system dynamics, and so on. This part of the talk will highlight potential methodological and theoretical contributions towards policy design for enabling a low-carbon transition in India (with possible implications for other developing countries).
Kaveri’s research is focused on the transition of energy and related sectors in the context of climate change under deep uncertainty. She approaches problems from the lenses of complex socio-technical systems, institutional analysis, systems thinking, and economics. Prior to joining IIT Delhi-SPP, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, on various aspects of India's transitioning electricity sector. She received her doctoral degree from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where she investigated the design of renewable support schemes in Europe and its long-term impacts on the energy system. Apart from this, she has also worked on capacity market studies in Europe and on the deployment of solar energy in India. Dr. Kaveri Iychettira is also an Associate with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a Fellow at the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University.