Currently, not all business-driven decisions are good for the climate and vice versa. Through a careful and meticulous balancing act, it is possible for businesses, regardless of industry sector, to implement decarbonization strategies that are not only climate friendly but also profitable.
Aravind Raju, our next pathbreaker, Energy & Carbon Analyst at CORE Markets (Melbourne, Australia), strives to help businesses decarbonize their commercial activities using the firm’s energy and carbon market intelligence services.
Aravind talks to Shyam Krishnamurthy from The Interview Portal about the exciting opportunity to work on a renewable energy policy project in order to understand the role of electric vehicles in supporting Australia’s electricity grid, through a phenomenon known as vehicle-to-grid (V2G).
For students, It is perfectly natural to think about tomorrow and keep asking yourself what you want to be. But it is also important to have fun and be in the moment, as simple as that.
Aravind, can you share your background with our young readers?
My upbringing itself was quite the journey! I was born in Chennai, went to play-school in Bangalore, attended Kindergarten to 2nd grade in Hong Kong, carried on from 3rd grade to early 10th grade in Singapore, and finally completed 10th grade through to 12th grade in Mumbai. I’ve deliberately begun my reflection this way so you get a taste of the privilege that comes with my upbringing. I’ve been blessed with a wonderful family, in which my father worked hard to become one of the few fully-qualified actuaries in India – a highly sought-after profession back when he was studying. As a result, my father was offered job opportunities not only within India but also internationally – in choosing the latter, my education was naturally bundled together with international exposure.
I was able to sustain my schooling in numerous countries through the International Baccalaureate, a school curriculum which is adopted worldwide, predominantly across private schools. In all the international schools I’ve hopped over, almost all my classmates describe a very similar upbringing to mine.
I admit I wasn’t the most studious throughout my schooling. In my early years I was very athletic – played a lot of tennis, badminton, swimming, basketball, and track & field. My fondest memories from middle school were outside the classroom, where I would drop my bags and head off to represent the school in competitive sporting tournaments. In my high school years, I developed a strong interest in the arts – I loved acting and playwriting in my drama classes, and after watching a lot of movies I even dabbled with filmmaking in my spare time.
At the time if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer would always change – I would say engineer, because I loved building things on Roblox creative servers, a tennis star because I loved playing tennis, or even a filmmaker because I loved watching director’s cuts.
What did you do for graduation/post graduation?
I studied a Bachelor’s degree in Renewable Energy Engineering (Honours) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. My engineering program focused on the applied sciences behind renewable energy resources – the technologies to harness these are being rapidly rolled out worldwide because they deliver electricity of the cheapest and cleanest form to consumers, something which traditional fossil fuel electricity sources cannot do.
The engineering degree itself can be described as a hybrid of mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering – the first year of engineering was common for all engineering disciplines, however second year onwards we branched out into our specialist streams. We learnt mechanical concepts such as aerodynamics and thermodynamics, which are relevant for the design of wind farms and thermal renewable energy systems. We learnt electrical concepts relevant to semiconductors and AC/DC power systems, which feed into the design of solar cells and grid-connected power generation. We went deep into chemical concepts like electro-chemistry and combustion, which directly feed into the operation of battery storage systems as well as production of green hydrogen / renewable liquid fuels.
What were some of the key influences that led you to such an offbeat, unconventional, and unique career in Renewables Technology?
As previously established, I wasn’t the most studious in school – I was merely a student who explored his interests as and when opportunities came his way. This was the case with athletics and the arts, which happened because of the amazing extra-curriculars and arts subjects my schools had to offer.
The turning point came when I moved back to India to complete high school. Until the middle of 10th grade, much of my schooling journey was in Singapore, a country that is so developed that you can easily take clean water access and air quality for granted. It’s one thing to visit India to see relatives, it’s another to relocate back to India and adjust to a whole new lifestyle – one in which even the basics like clean water access and air quality aren’t always guaranteed the same way as countries like Singapore.
Given the material lifestyle impacts, I was very motivated to understand the root cause of India’s environmental issues – naturally, geography became my favourite high school subject as it explored topics like energy, ecosystems, population demographics, and climate change. I also developed a soft spot for physics ever since I learnt about electromagnetic induction – a fascinating chapter in which I learnt the fundamentals behind power generation.
16-year old Aravind grew very obsessed with addressing climate change and had no clue what career or degree choices this would translate to. At a high-school career fair, my geography teacher planted the idea of a career in green technologies and it automatically clicked! I understood I wanted to be a scientist or an engineer that is environmentally inclined.
In researching university options, I was very adamant about them having an environmental engineering program – this itself was a challenge as a lot of the big names typically only offered civil engineering or at minimum, environmental science, at the time.
Finishing my studies at an international school in Mumbai, the majority of my cohort was keen on attending university in the US or UK – by nature, I dislike being a conformist unless I have to, and so naturally my research was focused on regions like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia – again, I disclose that I’ve been extremely lucky to have had the option to study abroad for my bachelors.
One day, I attended an Australian universities exhibition in Mumbai, in which I came across UNSW’s renewable energy engineering program – in all my research, I had never heard of such a specific degree. I learnt that UNSW is an industry leader in renewable energy technologies, so much so they have their own engineering school for this field. My parents were extremely supportive of this program as my final choice because they recognised it was an emerging field for the 21st century – and the rest was history.
How did you plan the steps to get into the career you wanted? Or how did you make a transition to a new career? Tell us about your career path
There was no special formula for university – just like school, I was taking on opportunities as and when they were there in hopes I’d learn something new about myself. In school years, I explored my hobbies and academic inclinations, and in university I continued to explore these as much as I could.
I thoroughly enjoyed my renewable energy engineering coursework – some even more than others. Like school, I got to do things outside of the lecture halls – I was active in student societies, dabbling with opportunities like social entrepreneurship, vertically-integrated engineering projects, and house committee leadership.
As my degree had an honours component, I was required to do a research thesis in my final year of study – this experience gave me a flavour of what it’s like to pursue academia. Unlike traditional coursework, there’s no syllabus – every student is expected to find a research supervisor in their specialist departments, agree on a research topic and timeline, and diligently work to deliver a final thesis draft by end of year.
Defining a research problem can be tricky, and this is where my opportunistic experiences helped me. Aside from the prescribed coursework for your specialist streams, you’re also expected to take electives, which are engineering courses of your choosing – in my university, not only did these include lecture-style courses but also real-world engineering projects, which we called vertically-integrated projects (VIPs).
In researching the VIPs on offer, I landed on a project called “Space Power Systems”, which was led by professors in my specialist department, with aim of developing high-performance solar cell and battery technologies for space missions. In this VIP, I got a head start in understanding what it’s like to undergo lab training, conduct reviews of existing scientific literature, and fabricate solar cells.
I took this VIP in my penultimate year and enjoyed the project work so much that I wanted to continue researching similar topics for my final year thesis. My VIP supervisor later became my thesis supervisor, and with him, I agreed to continue exploring the electric current output of perovskite-betavoltaic devices.
Bear with me as I try to explain this – the way a solar cell generates electric current is by having photons (i.e. light particles) strike a semiconductor material. In the same way, you can also have beta-particles (i.e. electrons or positrons) generate electric current by striking a semiconductor material, a phenomenon known as “betavoltaics”. You may ask yourself, where are these beta-particles? The answer is you find these in specific types of radioisotopes – these are materials like Nickel-63, which have an unstable nucleus and hence result to emitting electron radiation.
The cool thing about betavoltaics is that the electric current output is dependent on the emission of beta-particles – for those learning radioactivity in physics class, you’ll recall that radioactive materials decay exponentially over a long period of time, and so in theory, if you pick a betavoltaic source with a long enough half-life (i.e. time taken till half of all atoms decay), you will effectively have yourself a long-lasting power source – a nuclear battery running continuously over decades!
The kicker is that betavoltaic materials don’t generate a massive power output (as far I’ve researched), but their long-lasting abilities can be useful for low-power uses like sensors, such as those needed for deep space exploration.
It’s not good enough that the beta-source does all the hard work – the semiconductor material on the receiving end needs to be efficient and able to withstand electron radiation without degrading. Solar cells typically use Silicon as it’s cheap, has reasonable efficiency, and is commercially scalable – unfortunately, the material’s efficiency and radiation tolerance isn’t as competitive for betavoltaics, and this is where perovskites come in. Perovskites are an emerging thin-film solar cell material with the ability to fine-tune efficiencies based on chemical composition and are tolerable to electron radiation.
My thesis aimed to fabricate a specific type of perovskite material and expose it to electron- radiation to understand its electric current output, thereby mimicking a perovskite-betavoltaic device.
Indeed, it can sound very sci-fi and exciting, but it’s all fun and games until you get down to business. By far the biggest hurdle in my thesis were the experiments I had to run – it was helpful that my VIP project expedited my background review of scientific literature, but designing and executing experiments was a journey of immense trial-error.
Perovskites must be fabricated carefully in a lab, using delicate equipment and materials like glove boxes – lab safety cannot be compromised. My engineering course labs were nowhere near as intense as this – I was in a lab with serious PhD candidates, who were heads-down on their experiments, and there I was being chicken little!
I started obtaining “successful” experimental results just two months before my final submission, and that was because of immense trial-error in fabricating perovskites and later irradiating them under controlled conditions.
I learnt a lot about myself in this process, including my aptitude for considering academia. Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the research process and would do it again, but I also acknowledge that I’m not the best with experimental research problems.
Just as my thesis played an important part in my journey, so did the requirement of completing industrial training. For context, my university required engineering students to complete 60 days mandatory work placement to graduate. Searching for work is hard, and the tension compounds especially if you’re inexperienced AND an international student.
I admit, I was initially very picky about where to do my work placement, and this was because of how my professional interests were shaping at the time – I soon learnt that this strategy wouldn’t work and so I pretty much applied to any type of renewable energy engineering related role for the sake of getting my industrial training ticked off.
In searching for over a year, I landed an unpaid internship with a small startup that designs and installs rooftop solar panels around Sydney. In my role, I was supervised by an engineer who gave me day-to-day guidance on how to design rooftop solar panel systems for residential customers. As part of this role, we occasionally conducted site visits to inspect the performances of newly installed rooftop solar systems – my employer studied the same program at the same university, which helped us connect and build a bridge through our common study experiences.
In ticking off my industrial training, I was now on-track to graduate, and in my final year I decided to work part-time in a similar engineering role, this time as a paid employee – landing this new role became a lot easier and quicker because I now had work experience and a professional referee from my internship. In this paid role, I was now doing all of what I learnt in the small start-up, but now as part of a bigger team in a fast-paced environment.
Unfortunately, this second company was struggling financially and so they made our entire team redundant within months of hiring me. This was such an awful moment at the starting fire of my career, but fortunately, I had family and friends to comfort me – as my father is a seasoned professional in corporate, he validated my feelings and assured me that these things happen more often than you think.
Despite the circumstance, the company empathised with us and provided strong employer references to help with our new job search. Within months, I landed a graduate role as a consultant, working in renewable energy policymaking. The company was on a mission to help policymakers efficiently integrate distributed energy resources into Australia’s electricity grid – unlike large power plants, these include a distributed network of technologies like rooftop solar, home batteries, and electric vehicles.
At the time, this was the dream role because my professional inclinations were leaning towards the role of governments in scaling renewable energy uptake. The source of this inclination came from my engineering program, in which I took a course on renewable energy policy that opened my eyes to the inter-play of renewable energy and electricity markets – bringing both engineering and economics into the same problem space.
In my role as graduate consultant, I was using my engineering knowledge of renewable energy to help my team propose evidence-based policy recommendations for our public-sector clients. The beauty in this was that I got to work alongside professionals with a seasoned background in economics and public policy, and so naturally I was part of an inter-disciplinary symphony of engineering and humanities.
I understand this section is a long read, but I hope it gives you a flavour of the roller-coaster I was on to land my first full-time paid work out of university – not as straightforward as one might assume.
How did you get your first break?
As mentioned, it took me over a year to even land my first work placement – and when I did, it was unpaid. At a high level, I understood you needed a resume to apply to companies. Soon after finishing high school, a lot of my friends jumped onto LinkedIn, which I did as well, after seeing its job search function.
Since second year of university, I kept applying through LinkedIn to different internship programs. In my head at the time, only those who explicitly advertise internships with the exact keywords are ready to offer you a role and boy was I wrong – as a result of this mindset, the only jobs I would apply to were from the big companies, who are those with a dedicated hiring team and often use the exact keywords when advertising work placement roles.
These bigger companies get several thousands of applications and so they have a very structured recruitment process to help filter through, and for someone who’s only had structured learning experiences in classrooms this approach to job applications made sense – unfortunately this isn’t the case with a lot of small-medium enterprises, who often comprise the majority of workplaces and are a lot likely to offer you a role.
I had to put myself out there and ask for hiring referrals from seniors I knew who were working, attend professional networking events, visit industry job fairs, send cold emails to random small renewable energy companies I discovered through desktop research etc.
Of all the places I applied to, I’d say only 20% of them would extend the interview opportunity, out of which one of them was gracious enough to give me my first work placement.
What were some of the challenges you faced? How did you address them?
Challenge #1:
Being an international student – a problem which is very specific to those with aspirations of studying abroad. On paper, studying abroad sounds exciting if you can afford to get more out of your university experience. When it comes to applying for work, one needs to understand that they’re competing against domestic students – even if you both are just as skilled, the domestic student has the upper-hand with full working rights.
At least in Australia at the time, an international student on a student visa is limited to working 40 hours per fortnight unless the employment is relevant for their studies. Fortunately for my degree, work placement was mandatory and so this didn’t impact me as much. However, when looking for full-time employment under a temporary work visa (which I transitioned onto after graduating), I’ve been in situations where a job interview ends in 2 minutes because the recruiter learns that I’m not a citizen / permanent resident. While my career inclinations were in renewable energy policymaking, my work visa status effectively locked me out of any public-sector opportunities in this space – I was very lucky in finding a private company that specialized in renewable energy policy consulting.
Challenge #2:
Building a professional network – just as one does when they join a new school or college. When you build a social circle in school / university, they typically emerge out of friendships and rapport with teachers / professors – in the world of work, a professional network goes a long way with helping you find employment. As students, this can seem daunting if you’ve only ever been in classrooms and lecture halls.
To remedy this, effort is needed to meet people who are working in the industry – you’ll need to attend industry seminars, job fairs, networking events, industry-organised competitions / hackathons etc. At the time, these events were very daunting as I am fairly introverted.
How do you introduce yourself? What do you talk about? How do you leave a good impression on prospective employers? – these are all what went through my head. It’s all just practice and exposure therapy the more you put yourself out there – I’m not 100% there today, but I am definitely a lot better than where I was at the start.
Challenge #3:
Need experience to get experience – it is a classic chicken-egg problem which I’m sure transcends every line of work and not just renewable energy engineering.
Landing my first work placement took a long time as I didn’t have any relevant work experience to show for at the time. Among thousands of students who apply for a job, I suppose it’s natural for employers to take a close look at those who do cool things both in and out of the classroom, which is what happened to me. I studied well and was able to balance extracurriculars on the side – the employer from my first work placement loved that I dabbled in social entrepreneurship as an extracurricular because he felt it would make me a good-fit for a small start-up environment.
I didn’t intentionally think this was the way to go, but in hindsight it makes sense that the best you can do to stand out in absence of any work experience is take on cool opportunities both in and outside the classroom.
Where do you work now?
At present, I am an Energy & Carbon Analyst at a company called CORE Markets, which strives to help businesses decarbonise their commercial activities using our energy and carbon market intelligence services.
On the energy side, we work closely with project developers seeking final investment decision (FID) advice on their proposed renewable energy projects. My role is largely quantitative and involves conducting electricity market analysis for all types of energy advisory projects. On the carbon side, I model Australia’s industrial emissions trajectories and market demand for carbon credits – this work is heavily relied on by companies with large emissions exposure and looking to decarbonise in-line with national emissions targets.
For a lot of climate-oriented jobs, it’s easy to assume that you must study a specific pathway to get there – this was what I thought as a school student and now that I’m on the other side, I realise that this philosophy isn’t always true. Climate change is a problem which virtually impacts all aspects of human society – the way in which we organise, survive, and thrive, and so it requires a ground-up re-think of all human activities, something which industries around the world must reckon with.
My current job is junior-level and climate-oriented, so my primary expectation is being good with numbers and the ability to quickly learn industry concepts. In my case, I did a degree which directly prepared me for the work I do now and moreover, I had previous work experience in the industry which exposed me to Australia’s electricity market.
My line of work is known as consulting, which means our workdays revolve around helping other businesses with their decision-making. On any given week, I will be “resourced” onto a specific set of energy / carbon advisory projects and reporting to project managers (i.e my seniors) who give us guidance and correspond with our clients. Being a climate-oriented consulting gig, there’s a lot of high-impact work we do, and when our advice is acted upon, it can feel extremely rewarding.
The best part of the job is the people you work with and the projects you work on. In my team, there are a lot of amazingly talented people from different walks of life, all coming together for a common purpose. Not only are they engineers like me, but also graduates from accounting, economics, mathematics, geography, and arts. As everyone comes from various backgrounds, you discover different ways of solving a problem.
Similarly with clients, each one approaches us with a unique commercial problem that impedes their ability to develop a renewable energy project / decarbonise. With each project work, you develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for just how complex the climate issues are – this can serve as incredible motivation to learn more about Climate Change and seek out the solutions.
How does your work benefit society?
The work I do is at the intersection of what is right for the climate and for business – at present day, not all business-driven decisions are good for the climate and vice versa. Through a careful and meticulous balancing act, it is possible for businesses, regardless of industry sector, to implement decarbonisation activities which give them a return on investment without compromising on climate action. This is a world we will soon be living in, and so it is exciting to be part of the front-line which helps the world bridge gaps between climate and economy.
Tell us an example of a specific memorable work you did that is very close to you!
In my graduate role, I worked on a renewable energy policy project in which we were tasked to understand the role of electric vehicles in supporting Australia’s electricity grid, through a phenomenon known as vehicle-to-grid (V2G). In Australia, it is expected that the future electricity grid will be largely powered by variable renewable energy (i.e solar and wind). Though these resources are clean and cheap, they are intermittent – to firm up the supply of electricity, you need to deploy storage technologies like batteries, which can charge up when the sun is shining / wind is blowing, and later discharge back into the grid when vice versa.
Typically, when the renewable energy industry speaks about batteries, we think in terms of massive batteries built near a solar farm or wind farm – on a residential scale, even small battery packs of 5 – 15 kilowatt-hour (kWh) size, which customers can purchase together with rooftop solar panels to cut electricity bills. My project, however, was trying to understand the ability of electric vehicles to operate as “batteries on wheels”, one in which the battery serves a dual purpose of passenger transportation and electricity supply for the grid when sitting idle.
V2G is a very radical concept that has been proven and implemented across a lot of countries in Europe – my team was now tasked to explore its scope for impact in Australia and whether current policies and regulations are fit for purpose to incentivise these activities.
In all of what I’d learnt in my renewable energy engineering degree, dare I say that V2G was out-of-syllabus! (there, I said it) – this was a technological trend unraveling in real-time as soon as I graduated. In my capacity, all I knew at the time was how to play with numbers and do power-flow modelling.
At the end of the project, our team published a series of knowledge sharing reports, aimed towards major energy industry players and government policymakers, detailing the consumer and grid benefits of V2G in Australia. In this, we also outlined how V2G was being adopted internationally, the technical standards and policies which Australia needed to enact for V2G to happen, as well as the estimated reductions on customer electricity bills and frequency of peak power events.
Given I was just starting out in my early career, I was thrilled at how soon I was working on high-impact project work – a momentum which has only grown louder as we fast approach net zero by 2050.
Your advice to students based on your experience?
Have fun and be in the moment, simple as that. In all my ramblings, the various twists and turns eventuated the way they did because I was enjoying and making the most of what I was doing at the time.
What started as someone who just loved sports and the arts later evolved into this journey of fighting climate change as a renewable energy engineer – this journey is continuing and is not the end point.
It is perfectly natural to think about tomorrow and keep asking yourself what you want to be – if this works for you then great, if not don’t worry because time and available opportunities are always the antidote.
Future Plans?
I love what I did to get here, and I love what I’m doing now – echoing what I said earlier, I am making the most of the opportunities I have available today.
At present, all I want is to do my part and help the world rapidly decarbonise and achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Being a dynamic field, there’s lots to learn everyday at work, and with every project I work on, I discover new and exciting subject matter interests – today, this is scope 1 and scope 2 decarbonisation.