Dartmouth Events

University of Texas at Austin PhD student Vivek Shastry presents on recent research as part of the New Energy: Conversations with Early-Career Energy Researchers series. 

For over a billion households today, electricity is still unavailable, unreliable, or unaffordable. Historically, the use of stand-alone decentralized renewable energy (DRE) for rural electrification primarily focused on powering lights and mobile chargers. In the past decade, the electrification agenda has shifted to a demand-centric approach, focusing on understanding how rural livelihoods, healthcare, and education can be powered by DRE, enabled by a supporting ecosystem. In this talk, Vivek Shastry will present findings from an in-depth field study of rural entrepreneurs in southern India who are using solar powered appliances for a range of rural livelihoods and businesses. Specifically, he explores the market and non-market factors that influence entrepreneurs’ access to these solutions, and the mechanisms through which they contribute to building their resilience to future livelihood and climate shocks.

To learn more about the series and access videos of previous talks, visit dartgo.org/NewEnergy.