Expert Bio

Dr. Varun Sivaram is senior fellow for energy and climate at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also the Founder and CEO of Emerald AI, a technology company that enables AI data centers to flexibly consume electricity and bolster the power grid. Sivaram brings experience spanning the corporate, policy, and academic sectors, including as a C-suite executive at two publicly listed companies, as a senior U.S. diplomat, and as a physicist with expertise in clean energy technologies. His book Taming the Sun on the future of solar energy was named by the Financial Times among “the best books of the decade.”

Before joining CFR, Sivaram was chief strategy and innovation officer at Ørsted, a $25 billion Fortune Global 500 company that is the world’s largest producer of offshore wind energy. At Ørsted, Sivaram led an organization of 180 people comprising the corporate strategy, capital allocation, technology innovation, digital and AI, and partnerships and M&A functions. His teams executed several billion dollars in clean energy asset acquisitions, divestments,  joint ventures, and structured financing products; developed the company’s strategic approach to build renewable energy across three continents; and launched Ørsted Ventures to invest in next-generation companies. Earlier in his career, he served as chief technology officer at ReNew Power, a publicly listed multibillion-dollar company that is India’s largest producer of renewable energy, and as a consultant at McKinsey & Co.

Sivaram served for the first two years of President Joe Biden’s administration in the White House and State Department as the managing director for clean energy and senior advisor to Secretary John F. Kerry, the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. He created and led the First Movers Coalition, which President Biden called the flagship U.S. public-private partnership on climate, and which convened more than 100 of the world’s leading companies to make more than $12 billion in purchasing commitments to stimulate innovation in clean technologies. Sivaram also created and coordinated the U.S.-India Climate Action and Finance Mobilization Dialogue as well as the U.S.-Germany Climate and Energy Partnership. In addition to his service in the federal government, Sivaram has served in state and local government as senior advisor to the mayor of Los Angeles and to the governor of New York.

A widely published scientist and innovation scholar, Sivaram has served on the faculty of Columbia University and Georgetown University, where he created the course “Clean Energy Innovation” to train the next generation of energy leaders. He was also previously fellow and director of the energy and climate program at the Council on Foreign Relations. His books include Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet, Energizing America: A Roadmap to Launch a National Energy Innovation Mission, and Digital Decarbonization: Promoting Digital Innovations to Advance Clean Energy Systems.

TIME Magazine named Sivaram to its TIME 100 Next list of the next hundred most influential people in the world, MIT Technology Review named him one of the top 35 innovators under 35, Forbes Magazine named him to its top 30 under 30, and the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. His TED Talk on India's clean energy transition has been viewed more than one million times. Sivaram serves on the boards of the Atlantic Council, Everview Partners, and Aventurine Partners. A Rhodes and Truman Scholar, he holds a PhD in condensed matter physics from Oxford University, where he developed next-generation solar photovoltaic technologies, and undergraduate degrees in engineering physics and international relations from Stanford University. He lives in Washington, DC.

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At the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the United States would be expanding its defense partnership with India. His statement was in line with U.S. policy over the last two decades, which, irrespective of the party in power, has sought to cultivate India as a serious defense partner. The U.S.-India defense partnership has come a long way. Beginning in 2001, the United States and India moved from little defense cooperation or coordination to significant gestures that would lay the foundation of the robust defense partnership that exists today—such as India offering access to its facilities after 9/11 to help the United States launch operations in Afghanistan or the 123 Agreement in 2005 that paved the way for civil nuclear cooperation between the two countries. In the United States, there is bipartisan agreement that a strong defense partnership with India is vital for its Indo-Pacific strategy and containing China. In India, too, there is broad political support for its strategic partnership with the United States given its immense wariness about its fractious border relationship with China. Consequently, the U.S.-India bilateral relationship has heavily emphasized security, with even trade tilting toward defense goods. Despite the massive changes to the relationship in the last few years, and both countries’ desire to develop ever-closer defense ties, differences between the United States and India remain. A significant part of this has to do with the differing norms that underpin the defense interests of each country. The following Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) memos by defense experts in three countries are part of a larger CFR project assessing India’s approach to the international order in different areas, and illustrate India’s positions on important defense issues—military operationalization, cooperation in space, and export controls—and how they differ with respect to the United States and its allies. Sameer Lalwani (Washington, DC) argues that the two countries differ in their thinking about deterrence, and that this is evident in three categories crucial to defense: capability, geography, and interoperability. When it comes to increasing material capabilities, for example, India prioritizes domestic economic development, including developing indigenous capabilities (i.e., its domestic defense-industrial sector). With regard to geography, for example, the United States and its Western allies think of crises, such as Ukraine, in terms of global domino effects; India, in contrast, thinks regionally, and confines itself to the effects on its neighborhood and borders (and, as the recent crisis with Pakistan shows, India continues to face threats on its border, widening the geographic divergence with the United States). And India’s commitment to strategic autonomy means the two countries remain far apart on the kind of interoperability required by modern military operations. Yet there is also reason for optimism about the relationship as those differences are largely surmountable. Dimitrios Stroikos (London) argues that India’s space policy has shifted from prioritizing socioeconomic development to pursuing both national security and prestige. While it is party to all five UN space treaties that govern outer space and converges with the United States on many issues in the civil, commercial, and military domains of space, India is careful with regard to some norms. It favors, for example, bilateral initiatives over multilateral, and the inclusion of Global South countries in institutions that it believes to be dominated by the West. Konark Bhandari (New Delhi) argues that India’s stance on export controls is evolving. It has signed three of the four major international export control regimes, but it has to consistently contend with the cost of complying, particularly as the United States is increasingly and unilaterally imposing export control measures both inside and outside of those regimes. When it comes to export controls, India prefers trade agreements with select nations, prizes its strategic autonomy (which includes relations with Russia and China through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS), and prioritizes its domestic development. Furthermore, given President Donald Trump’s focus on bilateral trade, the two countries’ differences will need to be worked out if future tech cooperation is to be realized.