Interview with Srinivasan Padmanaban, Senior Energy and Environment Adviser to USAID and the recipient of the Clean Energy Awards.
 Despite the advances in human prosperity achieved since the dawning of the Industrial Revolution, there are growing concerns about the dysfunctional by-products of growth. Environmental degradation threatens the sustainability of the standard of living achieved by advanced economies just as much as it threatens the sustainability of the high rates of economic growth needed by developing countries. Today, the importance of sustainable development to all nations – rich and poor alike – is becoming so obvious that it is increasingly clear that the world is facing a climate emergency.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has worked in partnership with the Government of India over the past 50 years to develop and implement energy and environmental advances in India’s power sector. The scope of accomplishments cuts a wide swath through advances in technology to improvements in process and management. Two recent USAID-funded programs are aimed at reforming the electricity distribution sector and helping to solve the pernicious effects of the water-energy nexus – the largely unknown link between water usage and electricity consumption.
Recently, this latter program – the Water Energy Nexus Activity, or WENEXA – brought acclaim to USAID and Srinivasan Padmanaban | 
