India’s clean energy transition is no longer only about adding more renewable energy capacity. The bigger challenge is to build the systems around it: storage, skills, secure digital infrastructure, stronger industry-academia links and sustainability practices that actually work on the ground.
These themes ran through a two-day workshop titled Sustainable Bharat Advanced Clean Energy Workshop 2026 organised by the Sustainability and Energy Practitioners Association (SEPA), in Coimbatore. It brought together industry representatives, researchers, academics, practitioners and students to discuss battery energy storage systems, ESG, skills and agrivoltaics.
One point came up repeatedly: India cannot follow the same resource-intensive development path taken by many developed economies and then try to correct the damage later.
Krishnan Komandur, CEO, Adar Poonawalla Clean City Initiative, spoke about the importance of knowledge exchange between industry and academia, while making the larger point that growth has to be environmentally responsible from the beginning. Clean energy, he said, is important, but by itself it does not amount to true sustainability.
That industry-academia connection was also at the heart of the launch of the SEPA Student Council.
Dr Raghuram Arjunan, President, SEPA, said the idea is to bring colleges, students and practitioners into a closer working relationship. Students, he said, need exposure to what is happening in industry, while industry also needs a better understanding of emerging talent and skills.
SEPA already works with autonomous government institutions, research organisations and industry leaders, and the Student Council is expected to give students more direct access to this network, he added.
For Vijay, an Executive Council Member of the SEPA Student Council from PSG College of Technology, Tamil Nadu, that access matters because technology is moving faster than academic syllabi in many areas. Interaction with professionals, he said, can help students understand emerging technologies, keep pace with industry and make better career choices.
Venkatavaan, President of the SEPA Student Council from PSG College of Technology, Tamil Nadu, looked at it from another angle. For him, the value lies in meeting people who are already working in the field, sharing research ideas, gaining experience and opening up possible research and career opportunities. SEPA supports the research work and if the professionals are interested they can provide funds too.
Storage was another major focus of the conference, but the discussion went well beyond batteries as a piece of hardware.
Ilja Pawel of Renewable Energy Academy, RENAC AG, Germany, spoke about the conditions that could drive wider adoption of energy storage, particularly in the commercial and industrial market. Time-of-day tariffs, negative pricing and changing market structures, he said, could all influence how quickly storage becomes commercially attractive.
He also stressed that as renewable energy becomes a larger part of the grid, storage will have to support reliability and flexibility. Flow batteries and other forms of long-duration energy storage could become increasingly important in managing renewable energy variability.
But Pawel also drew attention to issues that can easily get lost in conversations about capacity and targets: engineering quality, safety, cybersecurity, standards and the recovery of valuable materials from batteries.
As storage systems become linked to critical infrastructure, he said, these questions become much more serious.
Nikhil Mangalori, Managing Director, Shunya Eco-Systems and Energy Solutions, focused on issues such as ancillary services, peak management, utility-scale BESS, renewable energy variability and safety and standards.
Adithya Ramalingam of Yokogawa India brought in the operational side of commercial and industrial BESS deployment, including load management, peak-demand reduction and the use of digital tools to manage energy assets. His strongest emphasis was on cybersecurity.
As energy systems become more connected and digitally controlled, the risk is no longer limited to data theft. A cyberattack on an energy asset can potentially interfere with electricity operations and, in a worst-case scenario, affect critical infrastructure.
Ramalingam said this is why cybersecurity has to be treated as part of the energy system itself, rather than as a separate IT issue.
He also spoke about secure cloud infrastructure and the growing emphasis on keeping critical data within compliant systems, particularly in public-sector projects.
The conversation naturally moved from cybersecurity to geopolitics and energy security. With global supply chains increasingly exposed to political and economic shocks, localisation and diversification are becoming important not only for sustainability, but also for resilience.
The second day shifted the conversation from technology to ESG and the question of what sustainability looks like in actual business operations.
The discussion focused on whether ESG can move beyond reports, targets and boardroom commitments and become part of everyday decision-making in companies and utilities.
Renewable energy integration, resource management, technology deployment and institutional capacity all came into the discussion. There was also concern that the environmental part of ESG often receives most of the attention, while social and governance issues remain relatively neglected.
A more balanced approach would mean looking not only at emissions and energy consumption, but also at governance, accountability, workforce capability and social outcomes.
This is especially difficult for MSMEs. Many smaller companies are now facing ESG expectations through customers and supply chains, but may not yet have the people, systems or resources to respond to them effectively.
The workshop concluded with a session on agriphotovoltaics, taking the discussion into the space where renewable energy, agriculture and land use meet. By the end of the two days, the message was less about any one technology and more about the ecosystem India will need to build around its energy transition, as Arjunan states that energy transition will have to experiment, innovate and lead to be cleaner, smarter and resilient.
(Sustainability Karma was the media partner of Sustainable Bharat Advanced Clean Energy Workshop 2026.)
