Energy for Growth Hub
Multimedia May 10, 2022

Episode #14 Ashvin Dayal: We Need to Redefine Energy & Development Progress

Dayal, Senior Vice President of Power & Climate and The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet at…
Rose Mutiso, Katie Auth
Better Metrics and Data

Dayal, Senior Vice President of Power & Climate and The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet at The Rockefeller Foundation, discusses how he got into working on energy, why he believes in raising the definition of energy access, and the power of philanthropy.

Ashvin Dayal leads The Rockefeller Foundation’s Power & Climate program, aimed at scaling up energy access and accelerating an inclusive energy transition in emerging markets. Over more than a decade with the Foundation, Ashvin has overseen investments in urban climate change resilience and distributed renewable energy, including leading the establishment of local dedicated platforms to expand clean energy access such as Smart Power India and Smart Power Myanmar. Most recently, he led the creation of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, a multi-billion-dollar effort supported by major philanthropies, development investors and specialized energy organizations aimed at advancing transformational projects on distributed renewable electrification, grid-tied renewables, and fossil fuel transitions in 80+ energy-poor nations. Before joining the Foundation, he held a range of senior leadership roles over 15 years with Oxfam in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and a master’s degree from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins.

Show Notes

Amped Up

Ashvin Dayal Interview

Transcript

ROSE:  I’m Rose Mutiso in London.

 

KATIE:  And I’m Katie Auth in Washington, and this is High Energy Planet, the podcast from the Energy for Growth Hub about new ideas to solve global energy poverty.

 

ROSE:  On today’s show we talk with Ashvin Dayal, who is a senior vice president of power and climate and the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet at the Rockefeller Foundation.

 

KATIE:  We’ll ask Ashvin about how to make global energy goals more ambitious, how he approaches climate resilience, and what special leverage, if any, he things philanthropy brings to the table for climate and energy.

 

ROSE:  But first Katie and I get amped up about contract transparency for power projects.

 

KATIE:  All that coming up on this episode of High Energy Planet.

 

[MUSIC]

 

KATIE:  So it’s time for Amped Up, when Rose and I talk about what we can’t stop thinking about right now in energy and development.  And this week we’re obsessing about electricity contract transparency–super-niche, super nerdy, let’s do it.

 

ROSE:  Ah Katie, I’m here for it.  [LAUGHTER] So, I mean, I’m, like, did you say “nerdy?”  Yes, I mean it.  Okay.  So the contract that governs the sale of electricity between an independent power plant and a utility is called “power practice agreement,” or PPA.  Just for those of you who are not, like, in power contracting lingo day in and day out, that’s what we’re talking about.

 

KATIE:  Right.  So these documents are basically a tool to allocate risk between the parties who are financing and developing the project and ensure that the people who need to get paid get paid.  So they contain the pricing information and other important project details.  And in mature energy markets in the U.S., in Brazil for example, and other places, there’s a ton of publicly-available data about these contracts because regulators require it.

 

ROSE:  But in most emerging markets the PPA is often negotiated, signed, and implemented behind closed doors and without public knowledge, even though these contracts are often guaranteed with public money, either from local governments or from a development funder.

 

KATIE:  Right, so the fact that these contracts are secret makes it difficult to understand what’s going on in a given market, what a competitive price really is, and also in many cases who might be benefitting on the side of these deals, which unfortunately is common.

 

ROSE:  So why should you, dear listener, care about this in addition to being a nerd (inaudible)?  Okay, so big picture.  Open markets drive competition, lower prices, and improve governance.  So without these things there’s no way we can end energy poverty (ad scale) or achieve any of our clean energy goals.  So it’s really interesting how this kind of really niche cog in the kind of legal/financial world of energy has such big bearing.

 

KATIE:  And, you know, I think it’s really important to say here that contract transparency is not in any way, like, a panacea to solving the power system.  And it’s not a replacement for trying to expand the use of competitive procurement systems like auctions, which are also crucial for clean-energy development.  But it’s a big first step, and it’s about recognizing the public interest in electricity, and demanding the same sort of accountability that we’ve come to demand for extractives in mining for example, and applying that to the power sector.

 

ROSE:  A hundred percent, Katie.  And, you know, listeners, for those of you who want to learn more actually our very first episode of the High Energy Planet we spoke to Amed Badissy who is a good friend of the Hub, and lives and breathes contracts and power contracts.  And check it out, it’s on our website, and learn more about the fascinating world of power contracts.  If you have an energy or development obsession, good or bad, tweet it to us at @EnergyforGrowth and we’ll include it with an upcoming episode.  Coming up we talk with Ashvin Dayal with Rockefeller Foundation.

 

[MUSIC]

 

ROSE:  Ashvin, welcome to High Energy Planet.  It’s so great to have you.

 

ASHVIN:  Thank you, it’s great to be here.

 

ROSE:  All right, let’s jump right in.  So Ashvin, you’ve had an incredibly varied career.  So you’ve gone from doing disaster recovery, post-conflict reconstruction, and poverty initiatives across the world to becoming a champion for energy development now at Rockefeller.  So it’s a pretty uncommon path.  How do you make sense of it?

 

ASHVIN:  [LAUGHTER]

 

ROSE:  It’s open-ended – starting with an open-ended question.

 

ASHVIN:  Indeed.  I don’t quite know how I make sense of it other than coming to the world of energy sort of by default, frankly.  About a decade ago I inherited a set of projects that we had been experimenting with in the Rockefeller Foundation in India, these distributed renewable energy projects.  And as you say, my background is really in rural economic development, doing a lot of work on disaster response, post-conflict economic development, and a lot of work on sort of poverty programmings.  And I’d always just treated energy as kind of like an input, right?  It’s either there – if it’s there, great, and if it’s not there, okay, you figure out other solutions.  I’d never really thought about it as being at the center of what is either constraining or enabling people’s opportunities, people’s mobility, people’s economic choices, etc.  And I think accompanying this work as a non-energy expert gave me just a very different understanding of a time about the future of development in the 21st Century.  When you think about how the world works today, the connectedness, the value chains and how they all link, I started to just understand and realize that energy actually is the thing that if I care about development and want to think about impact, it was actually – became the thing that I actually got completely fascinated by, and then it became the center of my sort of professional focus over the last decade.  Yeah, but if you’d asked me ten years ago or twelve years ago did I see myself working on energy, I pretty conclusively I think would’ve said no.

 

KATIE:  Was there a specific moment when you kind of had that shift where you realized energy was at the center, or was it a gradual shift in your thinking?

 

ASHVIN:  You know, I think it was gradual because I was – and gradual over two or three years of exposure to this.  Because I was on the one hand sort of grappling with the idea that all of a sudden the market was being asked to take care of this challenge and there was a lot of talk, a lot of buzz around distributed renewables, and mini-grids, and solar home systems.  And I was sort of thinking, well, if it’s such a great idea and it’s going to – you know, and everyone thinks it’s the next best thing after sliced bread, why isn’t it just happening on its own?  And so I guess I started with a sort of a healthy skepticism about that part of the kind of – of the sector.  But then when I started visiting and I started to understand the sort of complex interplay between the regulatory and policy side and what was actually happening on the ground, the idea that this had to be both a public and a private effort, things started to click.  But ultimately it was just looking at the transformational impact itself, right?  We’re starting to understand for women trying to get small rice-hulling businesses going, or gentlemen running sort of carpentry workshops, or whatever, it just sounds cliché but it was so real.  It was, like, oh, you can actually quadruple, 10x your productivity by having just reliable power.  And so that was probably the lightbulb moment, if you pardon the pun, that sort of – I think it just – like, I realized, okay, this is actually something that is sort of a below-the-radar issue in global development that we need to be really, really putting a lot more emphasis on.

 

KATIE:  Interesting.  So one of the other aspects of your career that we found really interesting when we were doing the research was that you’ve had this focus on climate resilience.  And I think when people in the U.S. or, say, Europe think about climate resilience a certain picture comes too mind.  It could be kind of large-scale protective infrastructure, like sea walls, and that’s really not what “resilience” necessarily means in an Asian mega-city, or in a post-conflict zone, or in a rural, you know, African area.  And you’ve worked in all of those contexts.  So we were curious about when you enter a specific place, a specific community and start working with them for the first time how do you go about understanding the resilience and what energy and climate resilience means there and how to address it?

 

ASHVIN:  Yeah, that’s a great question.  I mean, I think you’re absolutely right, we think about resilience as a physical resilience, right, the sort of infrastructure.  The sea wall is the sort of manifestation of that which is just – it tells you so much about inequity, and power, and inequality, and all of that in terms of, you know, when is a sea wall even worth building?  It depends what asset it’s protecting.  So yeah, if you have – used to go up and down the coast of Vietnam and you’d see, you know, this country that was booming in the last 15, 20 years, and you’d see a fishing village that is being completely devastated by climate change in terms of sea level rise and what it was doing to a whole set of sort of economic realities that nobody was going to build a sea wall around that fishing village because the net asset value of that village was so low.  And then you go, like, two kilometers south and there was this brand-new seven-star resort that of course had a sea wall in front of it.  But then it was just transferring the risk to the other places – to the fishing villages frankly on either side.  And so, you know, you started – I sort of started looking at – really started looking at resilience as an issue of power and inequality.  And so when you get into a community, whether you’re thinking about energy resilience or any other form, what are the choices that people have?  How much predictability do they have?  How much control do they have?  We talk about redundancy in a system, right, like other different ways.  And there’s sort of good redundancy and there’s forced redundancy, or forced resilience because people have no choice.  And then there’s sort of planned resilience.  And so, you know, I just started to get fascinated by what is it that actually enables people not just to cope but to sort of thrive and move forward and move upward?  And it was often these sort of intangible capacities that people had.  And it’s not the hard infrastructure but it was the soft capacities, the relationships people had with local institutions, their ability to organize around a particular solution.  I mean, a whole array of things.  And so it really became – for me it’s a really critical way of thinking about any of these social and development challenges.  And similarly when I cam to the world of energy I think that really stayed with me as thinking about what is it that communities are actually struggling with as a result of either really poor power access or none?  It’s a reliability – it’s just a form of resilience, right?  (Inaudible) know you can actually make choices day to day, week to week based on being able to predict something as just being within your control, then it’s a form of resilience.  Because it gives people choices that they have control over, rather than having to react to the environment around them.  So that’s kind of how I’ve always thought about it.

 

ROSE:  Often in development people are trained to solve problems very quickly, and so it’s really refreshing to be able to really think and reflect.  So I think in that vein, continuing your reflecting on work done and how it ties to other contexts…  So you’ve done significant work on electrification in India through Rockefeller Smart Power (India) Initiative; you mentioned this just a few moments ago.  So this project had a big focus on mini-grids, and I spent the earlier part of my career working on mini-grides in Africa where, you know, to be honest, we’ve seen a lot of skepticism in the sector stemming from a general sense of limited progress despite what is theoretically a lot of technological potential and years of investment.  And I think I kind of fell victim to that cynicism.  So what’s missing in Africa that we’re not getting the same success that you’ve seen in India?

 

ASHVIN:  Look, I mean, there’s all of the usual issues around policy and regulations.  I think, you know, there’s a huge amount of investor risk perception around mini-grids that is real because the cost structures are still challenging.  It does require significant concessional capital or subsidies.  You do need protection for assets in terms of what happens if the grid arrives.  And India definitely made some good strides on that front in 2013, 2014 with the UP mini-grid policy in (Uttar Pradesh) one of the largest states in north India.  Now, Nigeria adopted a mini-grid policy which hopefully will see Nigeria emerge as a kind of market meter.  But there’s another story there, right, density of population.  You’re trying to put – sometimes – I think probably we have to look back and understand some of the mistakes that were made trying to put sort of a Rolls-Royce where perhaps Mini Cooper was what was needed or whatever.  I don’t know my cars very well.  But, you know, we were probably…

 

ROSE:  With no offense to the Mini Cooper manufacturers [LAUGHTER].

 

ASHVIN:  Right, but you know what I mean.  But it’s the oversizing systems in pretty low demand.  You’re talking about in the Africa–and I hate talking about Africa as one sort of thing–but you know what I mean, in a sort of rural setting where per capita energy – electricity consumption is, like, sub-50 kilowatt hours, and you’re putting in a 50-60 kilowatt mini-grid, and there’s just no hope, right?

 

ROSE:  Yeah, there’s no consumption there.

 

ASHVIN:  The consumption isn’t there.  So that takes us then to the question of, you know, what do you do on the demand side and can you do more to stimulate demand?  So I think we’re probably still very, very early – and I know – you know, I might’ve said the same thing five years ago, but I think we’re still very early in the cycles of innovation around getting these models right.  I don’t think there’s any question–and I’d be curious if you feel otherwise–that distributed renewables have to play a significant role in Africa’s energy story, particularly if we care about inclusive development.  All to say I think there’s still plenty to do in the African cont- certainly from our perspective as the foundation and with the new Global Energy Alliance.  This is going to be a huge part of what we continue to focus on in sub-Saharan Africa, for whether it’s Nigeria, or Ethiopia, or DRC, or Sierra Leone, or – there’s still a massive, massive opportunity.  But I think we’re probably licking our wounds a little bit on some of the mistakes that we’ve made and coming back and saying, okay, let’s really rethink this.

 

[MUSIC]

 

KATIE:  Coming up we ask Ashvin about his work making global energy goals more ambitious and the role of philanthropy and ending energy poverty.  And of course we play Rant or Rave.  So Ashvin, you’ve been a significant supporter of the Energy for Growth Hub’s Modern Energy Minimum, which basically proposes a new higher threshold for energy access at 1000 kilowatt hours per capita, and includes non-residential electricity consumption.  So I’d like to hear your thoughts on why raising the definition of energy access is so important in your view.

 

ASHVIN:  Yeah right, I’ve been a huge supporter of it and we’ve had a lot of learning around this topic through the process of working with the Energy for Growth Hub team on it.  And I think it probably comes back to my earlier remarks just about my own personal journey in understanding the relationship between energy, electrification, and development.  And wen I started to really unpack that and think about – and talking with folks like yourself, and Todd, and others about where is the benchmark on energy consumption that is going to be relevant for the next five, ten, fifteen years in terms of the trajectory of development and creating opportunity at scale, and really driving economic growth, not at a macro level but at a community level of individual villages, and towns, and districts, and counties, etc., it was clear that the definition of “energy poverty,” as it currently stood, was just insufficient.  Okay, I mean, it’s fine.  Yes, everyone should consume 100 kilowatt hours of power, but everyone should consume a lot more than that.  And, you know, we know that when you look at a lower-middle-income country’s per capita GDP, and where they are on consumption of electricity, it’s thousands of kilowatt hours, right?  So there’s a massive gap and we felt that it was really important – I felt it’s really important to raise the ambition.  Even if 1000 can sound a long way away for a place that’s currently sub-100, that should be what we’re actually planning for, and that could be the way we think about what that end-state solution needs to be capable of delivering.  It feels like at 1000, which is where we are at with the modern energy minimum now, you’re talking about a level of consumption that is truly going to represent the entry of the vast majority of a population into that modern economy.  There can still be massive inequalities, and then that’s why the granularity of it becomes so important.  At an average level, you know, India’s already there, right?  It’s at about 1000 I think.  That doesn’t mean you don’t have energy-poor people in India, of course you do.

 

KATIE:  Right.

 

ASHVIN:  So I think I personally–and this may be where I’m sort of empirically going to get myself caught up in all sorts of knots methodologically–but I personally look at it as, like, every individual needs to be consuming that amount.  How you measure that and how you tell whether they are or they aren’t I have no idea.  We leave that to much smarter people.  But if you think about poverty rates themselves, which are basically historically calculated on the translation of a calorie – a caloric value into income, and you have a headcount rate of poverty…  So when you say 40% of people are below the poverty line it’s an actual count of how many people are consuming less than that level.  And the question that I think the modern energy minimum can help us start to ask is what is that for electricity consumption or energy consumption, whichever, you know you want – you can set it at whichever one you want.  Because if you believe that that is at the center of development then maybe we need to rethink how we talk about progress in these terms, not just as a narrow energy conversation but actually as a development conversation.  So I’m a huge fan of it.  I’m very conscious that there’s a lot more work to be done on it to actually turn it into something that can be used in that way.  But that was sort of my thinking on why I got sort of enthusiastic about it.

 

ROSE:  Do you face some pushback trying to push energy abundance message in a kind of energy austerity moment globally?

 

ASHVIN:  [LAUGHTER] Yeah, sometimes.  I think with the people who understand development less so, I think people who – I don’t want to sound divisive in this conversation, but I think people who are taking a pure climate focus don’t always appreciate the fact that, you know, when I say actually people have to consume a lot more, not less, energy and here’s how we need to do it, therefore together, (inaudible) sort of – to make the point, not to be difficult, would say, like, you know, I have no problem with coal, depending on who’s consuming it and for what purpose.  So obviously I don’t mean that from (inaudible) as devastating from a climate change perspective, but I think to make the point about equality, and opportunity, and…  So, you know, you chip away, you hammer away at this point.  And I think this is the beauty of renewables and distributed systems is that intellectually people can make the leap and say, ah okay, here’s a way in which people can consume more while still protecting the planet and its climate future.  And I think once people just sort of latch onto that, then you can start to have a real conversation about, okay, let’s now get back to the question of how do we make energy access and consumption levels way, way, 10x higher than the way they currently are, and take off the table the concern that, well, you can only do that by destroying the planet even more than it’s already being destroyed?  But you know better than me, Rose, this is going to play out in so many ways with, like, (inaudible) and these questions that we just have to be very [CROSSTALK].

 

ROSE:  Ashvin, actually I’m taking notes on your communication strategy because you kind of got us, like, almost in a panic with the coal comment.  And then you, like, walked us back with the, like, “Let’s see the big picture.  Let’s see the opportunity.”  And so I think you’re succeeding in the messaging even in this (inaudible) so-called convert.  So I think there’s hope [LAUGHTER].  Okay, so then very quickly, second – just brief response on tactics.  And I’m sorry, I feel like I’m asking all of the kind of cynical questions.  But okay, so (inaudible) applications of this modern energy minimum is to redefine access in the next round of sustainable development goals.  If we’re being honest though it’s not clear if we’ll even meet the current (SBG7) goal, you know, it’s a moving target especially with population growth in some geographies.  So what’s your outlook on the possibility of energy access to all by 2030, and is there a danger of focusing on an even higher target if we can’t achieve the current threshold?

 

ASHVIN:  I don’t think there’s a danger honestly, and I can come back to why I don’t think that.  I do think there’s a real risk that we don’t hit the basic target of energy for all, universal energy access as currently defined by 2030.  And that is a huge – that would be a huge stain frankly on our collective effort as practitioners, as citizens, as members of a global community.  So I’m optimistic up to a point, but I think we have to be pragmatic about the fact that there’s a gap in investment, there is a gap in the numbers and the progress being made, particularly in Africa, but elsewhere, too.  And, you know, we just have to kind of really double down and accelerate – we have to treat this like an emergency in the sense that we have to move much more quickly now in the next one or two years…  And I say that as someone who’s done a lot of emergency response work, and, you know, the mindset is just different.  And we need some of that.  To the point about does raising the bar help or hurt, obviously I believe it helps because I’m part of trying to raise that bar.  But I think it helps because you – it forces us to think about the kind of solutions that we need to put in place over the next two, five, seven, ten years.  And I think it makes it very clear that this is just – getting to step one of universal energy access is just, like, that’s step one.  And then you’ve got, like, five other steps that we have to go to.  And again, I come at this from a development perspective.  For me universal energy access is not the unlock to development.  It’s significantly high levels of energy consumption.

 

KATIE:  So we want to make sure we get a chance to talk about the Global Energy Alliance, which is the monster, very exciting initiative that I’m sure is taking up a thousand percent of your time right now.  On the surface the Global Alliance might resemble, and to some people certainly seems similar, to certain things that we’ve seen in the past like Power Africa, like the Global Commission to end energy poverty, and many other programs.  So I’m curious what do you think will set you apart?  And then secondly, what have you learned from those past initiatives that you’re really integrating into the design of the global alliance to make it as effective as possible?

 

ASHVIN:  I think what’s different is a couple of things.  One is I think it’s the first time you’ve seen philanthropy come together at this scale around a unified agenda.  You know, we have – it’s not insignificant in terms of, you know, $1.5 billion of philanthropic capital, grant capital potentially that can be committed to try and advance these projects and agendas in different countries over the coming years.  And we’ve never had that level of unified sort of collective action across philanthropy before.  And so I think that is important because it’s big enough and unified enough to then be able to do the second part, which I think is different, which is being able to pull an alliance together not just as sharing our voice, but actually committing to work in a more structured way of putting together projects that combine different types of capital.  So whether it’s the multilateral development banks and the likes of World Bank, African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, who bring really, really important both policy and regulatory assistance, but also really important public financing, right, the wort of subsidy side of this.  And I want to keep calling that out.  That is really important.  And then you’ve got a set of development finance institutions that do invest on more commercial (inaudible) but with, in theory, higher-risk capita.  It’s like the IFCs and the CDCs, etc.  But we have an ability now to push that risk appetite further by saying, look, if we can work on big transformational projects together we can bring not just some ideas but a sort of a chunk of capital that should allow you to be bolder, move quicker, take more risks.  Because, you know, we are all frustrated sometimes at the pace at which these things move.  And so I think it enables a pace to accelerate and to think bigger on projects.  And, look, when you talk about Power Africa, who’s a part of the Global Energy Alliance, or Sustainable Energy For All that is a key partner in this work, and RMI, and so many other players, International Solar Alliance, I think what we’re just trying to do is unify this sector in a way that perhaps hasn’t happened before.  And I – you know, we are going to have to learn together, we’re going to have to work together and act together, and that’s very much the spirit of what this is attempting to do.  And the last thing I’ll say on it is, like, you know, it needs to endure.  This is going to take – it’s more than getting to a 100 kilowatt hours, it’s more than getting to energy access, it’s about inclusive energy transitions, right?  It’s going to take ten, fifteen, twenty years.  And that’s part of the reason why we felt it was important to institutionalize it and actually move it outside the Rockefeller Foundation so that it’s not just the initiative that can be shaped and changed based on what one individual philanthropy decides it wants to do suddenly four years or five years from now.

 

KATIE:  There’s some debate over whether philanthropy should be driving really tough conversations about policy and geopolitical issues.  How do you think about that?

 

ASHVIN:  There is a debate.  I think it’s a good debate.  I obviously sit within – inside a philanthropy and therefore believe that philanthropy has a legitimate role to play.  My personal philosophy is an important guide for me on that to being really honest, which is I think in a sector like energy if you don’t take a public/private mindset to this then you are doomed to fail.  If you think is all going to happen as a result of enlightened private sector investments I think then we’re sort of doomed to failure.  It’s going to have to be about pulling together the public and private sector.  And I think that’s where philanthropy can actually be really powerful and really effective is in doing that.  I think the other word that we hear a lot in philanthropy is “risk,” right?  It’s the sector that can take the greatest risk.  And I think we have an obligation to take risks that are well-informed.  Because, you know, we were having this conversation the other day on our team–actually nobody really takes any personal risk, right?  The people taking the risk are the consumers of power.  I’m sitting in a philanthropy – you know, I’ve got a degree and this and that.  And if I – you know, if I take a risk and I lose my job I get another job.  And so you have to actually I think make it really personal.  And if we don’t collectively take risk in a considered way then we’re completely irrelevant because we don’t have actually more money than the – certainly in the private sector.  We have less money than governments.  We have less money than the DFIs and the multilaterals that I talked about earlier.  So really it’s only when we take risk and we do it within a public/private framework that I think philanthropy can be just outstanding as a catalyst for change.  But that’s how I look at it.  You’ll probably get ten different answers from other people working in my own institution, let alone in others.

 

[MUSIC]

 

ROSE:  Okay Ashvin, now it’s time to play Rant or Rave, which is a quickfire game in which we give you a word or a term and you choose to either rant or rave about it and explain why.  So we have sixty seconds today to get through as many of these as we can.  So we want (inaudible) response for each of these, really quick, first thing on your mind.  So are you ready?

 

ASHVIN:  Ready.

 

ROSE:  All right, let’s go.  Living in Bangkok.

 

ASHVIN:  Oh, completely loved it.  I miss it so much.  I wish I was back there.  The food, the weather, the people, yeah, couldn’t rave enough.

 

KATIE:  Man City.

 

ASHVIN:  Terrible [LAUGHTER], just awful.  They’re going to steal the league from us yet again it looks like.  And I’m devastated, especially by their win yesterday.

 

KATIE:  I’m sorry to hear that- you’re a Liverpool fan, is that right?

 

ASHVIN:  I am, indeed.

 

ROSE:  All right, NYC winters.

 

ASHVIN:  Gosh, I’m, like, right on the fence on that one.  Not sure whether rant or rave, although I did really love being in Central Park yesterday when it felt for the first time like spring was here.

 

KATIE:  Great British Baking Show?

 

ASHVIN:  [LAUGHTER] You know, it’s turned from a rave to a rant.  It’s just got…

 

KATIE:  Oh no.

 

ASHVIN:  …(inaudible) full of itself.  It’s got too full of itself.  I don’t like it anymore, and I’ve stopped watching it.

 

ROSE:  You know, that last season, okay, you know, this is getting off – that last season really pissed me off.  I felt there was a certain contestant who should’ve won.  And (inaudible). [LAUGHTER]

 

KATIE:  Wading into some controversy there.

 

ASHVIN:  Yeah.

 

ROSE:  All right, I think that’s it.  Yeah, we’ve done our one minute.  You did really well with time.

 

ASHVIN:  All right, cool.

 

KATIE:  Ashvin, thank you so much for being with us on High Energy Planet.  This was really fun to get a chance to talk to you.

 

[MUSIC]

 

ROSE:  That’s it for today’s show.  High Energy Planet is a production of the Energy for Growth Hub, matching policymakers with evidence-based pathways to a high-energy future for everyone.  Find out more at EnergyforGrowth.org and tweet your questions and thoughts to us at @EnergyforGrowth.

 

KATIE:  If you liked today’s episode be sure to rate and rank the podcast and tell a friend about us.  Bob Lalasz is our executive producer, Mariel Ferragamo is our senior producer.  Join us next time for more High Energy Planet.

 

[MUSIC]

 

[0:30:59]

 

END (ASHVIN DAYAL INTERVIEW)