Dr. Kaveri Iychettira is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. At the Belfer Center she works on the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program’s (STPP) Emerging Issues Project. Her project is focused on: (a) identifying long-term strategies to enable India’s electricity markets and trading mechanisms to handle greater shares of intermittent renewable energy; and (b) evaluating low-carbon and cost-effective technology options in India to compensate for the intermittency of wind and solar power in the middle term (20–30 years).
She has extensive experience with simulation techniques for socio-technical systems such as agent-based modelling. She is also well-versed with using institutional frameworks qualitative techniques for analysing complex systems. Finally, she is also helping strengthen a research collaboration between institutions in India and Harvard University to set up a project focused on India’s energy transition.
She received her doctoral degree from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and her dissertation was titled, “National Renewable Policies in an International Electricity Market: A Socio-Technical Study.” During her Ph.D. research, she investigated the design of renewable support schemes in Europe and its long-term impacts on the energy system. Apart from this, she has also worked on capacity market studies in Europe and on the deployment of solar energy in India.