Reshma Singh
Reshma Singh is the Program Director of the Department of Energy’s tech-to-market IMPEL program, the California Energy Commission's R2M2 Microgrids program, and previously the Presidential U.S.-India Center for Building Energy Research and Development (CBERD) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She brings over 10 years of experience advancing urban sustainability and cleantech innovation, and working with complex international ecosystems in the United States, India, and Singapore. Reshma’s work lies at the intersection of design and technology of smart buildings and cities, with a focus on energy, data analytics and UX, and IoT sensors and controls.Reshma holds two cleantech patents. She is the lead author of Building Innovation Guide, and is a contributor to Mutations: Harvard Project on the City and The Bay Area-Silicon Valley and India: Convergence and Alignment in the Innovation Age. She serves on the Telecommunications Industry Association’s (TIA) Smart Buildings and Power and Energy group, and is on the Advisory Council for the State Department’s international TechWomen program (techwomen.org). Reshma previously co-founded GreenExcel, an online education platform. She is a recipient of the American Association of University Women award, Harvard University’s Community Service Fellowship award and has taught graduate seminars at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at University of California, Berkeley. Apart from her professional life, she teaches dance and has co-produced an acclaimed children's musical. Reshma holds a master's degree from Harvard University, and a bachelor's degree in architecture from New Delhi, India.
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While the COVID-19 pandemic provided the original backdrop to review the status of the built environment and its resilience, climate change continues to manifest as an existential threat. We attempt to summarize and provide a structured perspective on transforming India’s built environment, taking stock of emerging realities attributed to climate change and sustainability (planet, people, and prosperity).
Three interdependent, concurrent drivers, Decarbonize, Democratize, and Digitalize are essential for the required transformations in the built environment. Decarbonization aims to drop the exponentially accruing carbon footprint attributed to modern society to fundamentally restore and reset planetary systems that society is attuned to.Democratization aims to overcome deprivation and marginalization, to be inclusive of diversity in culture, geography, and aspirations in providing a healthy and resilient living environment. Digitalization could provide the ubiquitous digital connectivity and Internet of Things as the unifying fabric encompassing environmental stewardship to network, facilitate, operate, and underscore transformations across all seven sectors in the built environment, viz., residential, agriculture, administration, industry & commerce, education & research, infrastructure services, and transport and communication.
Decarbonize, Democratize and Digitalize, like in a triple helix, are intricately linked, and may be achieved through five actionable levers: Research and Development, Technology, Human Capital, Policy and Economic Investment. This structure aims to support wellness and resilience in the built environment and restore planetary stability.
Wellness provides the much-needed paradigm to unify the outcomes emerging from the seven built-environment sectors. Clarity needs to emerge on the definition and assessment of wellness and sustainability, as it would apply to various activities and stakeholders, to achieve carbon neutrality. There is an imminent need for restoring ecosystem services and enhancing biodiversity. Wellness as a fundamental right permeates all aspects of the built and natural environment and the planet. The built environment (urban to be specific) also needs to be reconfigured keeping in mind human scale and socio-temporal sensitivity, e.g. open spaces, pedestrian mobility, social inclusiveness, nature and recreation. In addition to equitable and affordable access to a healthy living environment, meeting inter-generational aspirations is crucial.
This pa has taken stock of current status and challenges in the built environment while also identifying multi-sectoral recommendations at the building, community and regional/national scales. Each of the three drivers has been articulated in detail, highlighting challenges and opportunities in terms of market barriers, policy and institutional challenges, and societal saliency.
Decarbonization approaches include reduction in embodied and operational carbon and circularity of materials, products and spaces. Democratization approaches include provision of inclusive, healthier built environments and communities, resilience to unprecedented health and climate risks, and reinforcing positive sustainable behavior. Digitalization approaches include all stages of building lifecycle, community-scale systems, and unlocking region-specific transformations. This involves a national computing and networking infrastructure, archiving and revival of traditional knowledge, and adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence based analytics for the built environment.
At the UN Climate Change Conference 2021, India announced a target of net zero emissions by 2070. India will reduce its projected Carbon emissions by 1 billion tonnes and the carbon intensity of its economy by 45% by 2030. In order to approach, and as we believe, surpass this target, it is absolutely critical to transform the built environment that constitutes nearly 40% of global energy-related GHG emissions. While other energy sectors such as centralized renewables may require significant infrastructure change and investment, building technologies can create quick climate wins. In India where half of the buildings and homes that will be standing in 2050 have yet to be built, but once built will last 50-100 years, this is a historic opportunity. It is also a contrast to decarbonizing sectors such as transport where the assets are short lived. The built environment thereby lends itself to democratization and faster adoption as one of the most cost effective and deep carbon abatement wedges while being the human theater for wellness and health.
Ten key considerations have been identified along the three drivers with a vision of a zero-carbon built environment promoting digitally-enabled equitable wellness and resilience for all.
There can be several benefits from such collaboration models – Parrish et al [3] affirm that international programs can build capacity, challenge the status quo, and create new resources in support of significant energy savings. Firstly, an international team can offer unbiased, scientific, innovative, and effective energy- efficiency research and development (R&D). Secondly, collaboration models that draw upon global expertise support knowledge transfer through lessons learned and insights, which in turn facilitate “leaps and breaks”. The latter may be more effective as transformational advances, compared to incremental improvements through only in-country approaches. Thirdly, complementarity in learning through bi-lateral or multi-lateral R&D can create a powerful and synergistic approach to support the mutual evolution of building energy efficiency in the collaborating countries [3]. On the other hand, there may be certain challenges, such as cultural and policy differences, that make it difficult to understand the partner country’s ways of working and implementation.
In this paper we present a case study of a unique United States and India building energy-efficiency program, the virtual Center for Building Energy Research and Development (CBERD). Awarded under the auspices of the U.S.-India Partnership to Advance Clean Energy (PACE), this program drew upon the complementarity of the R&D partners’ experience and knowledge, to implement strategies for building lifecycle performance assurance while emphasizing solutions that leapfrog transitional technologies [4]. This paper provides a description, an overview of outcomes and lessons learnt, as well as future R&D directions from the five-year CBERD research program, The outcomes and implementation of the program are applicable to India with two-thirds of its building stock still to be built, as well to the U.S. with a primarily buildings retrofit paradigm.
Modeling platforms exist for city energy benchmarking, inventorying, and GHG emissions forecasting and planning. However, the wide variety and features of today’s tools, their focus on a sub-set or snapshot data from various energy generation and consumption sectors, and the fact that many of them are not open data models, create sub-optimal environments for the energy analysis districts are seeking to conduct. Hence, we have developed a new software tool with customized data and dynamic visualization; DEPICT (Decision-support and Emissions Prediction Interactive Cities Tool) to obtain energy and emissions forecasts at different stages of the districts’ build-out by varying selected design parameters. This report presents the methodology and framework we have developed to estimate whole district emissions and details the results by district, with the objective of finding insights into the main sources of emissions, and the available levers to reduce them efficiently. This document details the impact of each emissions mitigation measure investigated, along with the assumption and models that were used to reach these values. The key findings for each district are presented.