Abhishek Asthana

Title : Forecasts of global renewable energy generation and analysis of key factors affecting the growth of renewable energy markets.

Abstract:

Just as the world started taking serious steps towards keeping the global temperature rise to under 1.5oC through sustainable energy use, events around the world have created the first truly global energy crisis. The disruption of energy supply chains from Russia has led to steep rise in the price of fossil fuels with severe implications for cost of living, raw materials availability and food security, affecting almost every country in the world. At the same time, energy companies are registering their biggest profits ever which has prompted various European countries to impose windfall taxes on them in polticial decisions which, in turn, has dampened investor confidence in the sector. In order to ensure energy security, some countries have taken desperate steps by reversing their energy policies and issued fresh licences for coal, oil and gas extraction including fracking after banning them earlier, which is a short-term backward step towards their carbon reduction targets. This has sparked unprecedented drive for renewables with governments taking steps to accelerate renewables capacity in order to reduce reliance on imported fuels while maintaining progress towards clean energy goals. This talk will present an analysis on the sector, based on current policies and market developments in various geographical regions. It will frame current policy and market dynamics while placing the recent rise in energy prices and energy security challenges in context. It forecasts the scenarios of deployment of energy technologies in renewable electricity generation, renewable transport fuels and renewable heat to 2027 while also exploring key challenges to the industry and identifying barriers to faster growth.

Audience Take Away

• Identify the drive for various renewable technologies from economic and policy perspectives.
• Identify the key opportunities and barriers to the further growth of renewables
• Prioritise areas of research to focus on and commercialisation of technologies

Biography:

Dr Abhishek Asthana is the Director of Hallam Energy at Sheffield Hallam University(SHU) and has successfully led 65 projects of industrial energy research and consultancy. He has won £9.5 million external funding, co-authored 100 conference and journal papers and 3 books, invented 4 patents and developed 5 commercial software packages. In 2015, he established a Doctoral Training Alliance (DTA) in Energy to train PhD students conducting energy research which now has 90 PhD students across 19 British Universities and Abhishek is its Deputy Director. He led the DTA in winning €6.5 Million funding from the European Commission’s MSCA COFUND to further expand the DTA program. Abhishek is a reviewer for the International Energy Agency (IEA), member of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and member of All-Party Parliamentary Group for Energy Studies (PGES). He is also the sole director of Parashakti Energy Ltd., offering energy consultancy services to industry.