Dipesh Pherwani
Associate Director, Industry
India Energy & Climate Center
India Energy & Climate Center
Dipesh Pherwani is Associate Director – Industry at the India Energy & Climate Center (IECC), where he leads work on decarbonization across India’s energy-intensive sectors.
Dipesh brings 16 years of experience in the energy sector, most recently at Harvard’s Belfer Center, where he researched how AI-driven data center growth is reshaping U.S. electricity markets and developed a power infrastructure and procurement framework for gigawatt-scale data center investments in India. He also advised the World Bank’s ESMAP program on hydrogen investment across emerging markets.
Before Harvard, Dipesh spent eight years at India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE): leading the design of the $2.1B National Green Hydrogen Mission and spending five years aligning federal and state policies and regulation to support renewable energy growth — including the Green Open Access Rules that let large industrial buyers contract directly with renewable developers, and the transmission pricing reforms that enabled over 100GW of renewable integration. He developed frameworks for India’s hydrogen-focused task forces with the U.S. and Germany, and led technical negotiations for a $3B World Bank results-based financing program.
Earlier in his career, Dipesh spent seven years in the private sector in project management and commercial roles at Reliance Infrastructure and Welspun Energy.
Dipesh holds a Master in Public Administration in International Development from Harvard Kennedy School, a MicroMasters in Data, Economics, and Development Policy from MIT, and a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering.