Interview with Dr. Shivani Sharma: Powering India’s Sustainable Energy Future

What excites me most is the audacity of it. Every nation must build clean energy infrastructure — but India is doing it at 1.4 billion-people scale, during peak economic growth, without the luxury of sequencing one before the other. The West industrialized first, then decarbonized. India is doing both simultaneously. India crossed 50% of installed power capacity from non-fossil sources in June 2025^[1] , five years ahead of schedule — and is now on course for 500 GW of non-fossil capacity by 2030, a commitment made at COP26 that once seemed impossibly ambitious. What makes this genuinely historic is not the numbers alone — it is the proof of concept: that growth and decarbonization move in the same direction. India is not following anyone’s template for the energy transition. It is writing its own.

Power Consulting is product and system-agnostic — we bring deeply embedded knowledge of technologies, standards, and local grid codes to help utilities, developers, and governments navigate the full journey from planning to operation. My work spans grid planning, renewable integration, power system studies, and EV electrification infrastructure: taking a policy ambition or a developer’s vision and making it engineerable, from feasibility through to implementation-ready decisions. Beyond projects, I serve on India’s Ministry of Power Energy Stack Task Force and the EU–India Smart Grid Expert Panel — so insights from the field directly shape the frameworks that govern the sector. That feedback loop — from grid to government and back — is where real acceleration happens.

Adding gigawatts is a procurement challenge. Managing them reliably is a systems challenge — and India is rising to meet it with real ambition. Grid-scale storage is scaling rapidly: India’s National Electricity Plan targets 411 GWh of storage by 2032^[2], and a 51+ GW pumped hydro pipeline^[3] gives India a natural geographic advantage few countries can match. The work has shifted to storage integration, grid intelligence, and market design rewarding flexibility. This phase is more technically complex than deployment — and exactly where Power Consulting’s expertise contributes most.

Participating in the IEA’s expert group on smart grids in emerging markets^[4] made something viscerally clear: the world is not just watching India’s transition. It is actively studying it as a model. Four trends will define the next decade. Grid intelligence — digital substations, AI-assisted planning, advanced protection systems — as the foundation of a high-renewable grid. Pumped hydro and long-duration storage, where India’s geography is a genuine strategic asset. Medium and heavy-duty vehicle electrification, whose grid implications are still underestimated by most utilities. And new demand frontiers: data centers and AI compute facilities are reshaping load profiles in ways grid planners are only beginning to address. In 2024^[5], 83% of India’s power sector investment went to clean energy. The knowledge being created alongside that investment is equally valuable — and increasingly, globally exportable.

Women account for just 11% of India’s renewable energy workforce^[6] — against a global average of 32%^[7]. But India holds a distinct opportunity within this challenge. Unlike mature markets where professional norms are entrenched, India’s transition is still creating the roles that will define it — in storage integration, grid AI, electrification advisory — and those norms are still being written. Women who enter now help shape what expertise looks like. With 3.4 million clean energy jobs projected by 2030^[8], the question is not whether opportunity exists. It is whether we actively build the pathways for women to claim it.

Three levers: visibility, skills, and accountability. Visibility because young women calibrate ambition against what they see is achievable — which is why I am deliberate about policy forums, research, and international platforms. Skills — and here Hitachi Energy leads by example: our Women in Engineering (WiE) CSR programme^[9], launched in 2020, already has 80 graduates employed in the engineering workforce — that is not aspiration, that is outcome. We currently support 250 students across 8 states, with a fresh batch of 220 joining in 2026–27. I take sessions for these students personally, covering technical subjects, soft skills, and career planning, alongside factory internships at Peenya, Mysore, and Maneja — because the pipeline into this sector must be built from the ground up, not just hired from the top. And accountability: organizations that embed gender equity into how they operate — not just what they declare — are the ones that move. Hitachi Energy India recently introduced menstrual leave^[10] — a signal that we recognize the full reality of women’s lives, not just their professional contributions.

The stubbornness of progress — and something far more personal. I am a professional and a mother raising my daughter in Delhi. When I look at the air quality in this city, the reliability of power, the future she will inherit — clean energy stops being a career and becomes a purpose. Policies that seemed impossibly ambitious in 2010 are standard practice today. Communities that lacked reliable electricity when I began my career now have it. The most important thing I can do, alongside the technical work, is make this path visible and real for the generation that comes after.

Profoundly — and the most exciting chapter is just beginning. Over 2.8 crore households are now connected, and rising per-capita consumption signals that energy access is deepening, not just broadening. What excites me most is the layer being built above infrastructure: India’s Energy Stack is creating the digital intelligence that will enable peer-to-peer energy trading, real-time grid optimization, and genuinely decentralized clean power for citizens and communities^[11]. Energy is not a sector. It is the infrastructure on which health, education, economic mobility, and dignity run. The grid we build in the next ten years will shape Indian lives for the next fifty.

Come in with your full technical ambition — this sector is not settled. The problems defining India’s energy future in storage, grid intelligence, electrified mobility, and green hydrogen do not yet have established answers. Build skills at intersections: where engineering meets policy, where analysis meets communication, where local knowledge meets global standards. And remember — the expertise being built here in India is transferable to every emerging market facing the same challenges. You are not just building a career. You are building knowledge the world will need.

The hope of structural change, not symbolic progress. The clean energy transition will reshape the global economy more profoundly than any industrial shift in living memory. Women must be at the centre of it — not as advisors on the margins, but as engineers, investors, policymakers, and leaders with the authority to act. A sustainable planet and genuine gender equity are not parallel goals. They are the same goal, approached from different angles. The grid that powers a just and livable future must be built by everyone. That is not a value statement. It is an engineering requirement.