Keynote Speakers

Speaker Day 1 (Tuesday, 20 October 2020)

Dr. Edward Vine

Evaluation of Energy Programs and Policies in the Asia Pacific Region: Current Status, Challenges and Opportunities Ahead

Edward Vine is an Affiliate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where he had been involved in the evaluation of energy efficiency programs, policies and technology performance measurement for over 40 years.
Dr. Vine contributed to the development of the California Public Utilities Commission’s Energy Efficiency Evaluation Protocols, the US Department of Energy’s Impact Evaluation Framework for Technology Deployment Programs, and the National Action Plan on Energy Efficiency’s Evaluation, Measurement and Verification Guidelines. He was also on the Board and the Planning Committee of the International Energy Program Evaluation Conference (IEPEC), and was on the Planning Committee of the International Energy Policy and Program Evaluation Conference (IEPPEC).
He has received the following awards related to his work on evaluation: the Lifetime Achievement Award from the IEPEC, Outstanding Achievement in Marketing Research and Evaluation Award from the Association of Energy Service Professionals and Certificates of Appreciation from the IEPEC and from the International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol (IPMVP) organization. In 2007, as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
He has consulted on evaluation projects around the world. For the last five years, he has been working with colleagues in creating a community of evaluators in Asia. He has led several evaluation workshops in Asia, was instrumental in establishing the first conference in Asia on the evaluation of energy efficiency programs and policies, and, working with others, created an organization, Energy Evaluation Asia Pacific (energy-evaluation.org) to support the evaluation of energy policy and programs.
Dr. Vine has a BS in Environmental Studies from Middlebury College, and a MS and Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California at Davis.

Speaker Day 2 (Wednesday, 21 October 2020)

Dr. Joydeep Dutta

Professor and Head of Functional Materials Group Department of Applied Physics, SCI School, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Sweden e-mail: joydeep@kth.se

Energy-efficient Brackish Water Desalination with Membrane-free Capacitive Deionization

Safe and reliable provision of fresh water is very important for future decentralized water systems to be implemented in a circular economy. It is estimated that two-thirds of the global population experience severe water scarcity at least one month in a year. Capacitive deionization (CDI) is an upcoming desalination technology that is positioned to provide cost-effective, low carbon footprint water treatment. It is an electrochemical technology for removing charged species like ions of salt from water working on “capacitive ion storage” phenomenon, where in response to energy applied as voltage or current across CDI electrodes, ions of salt are accumulated and stored capacitively as electrical double layers at the surfaces of CDI electrodes (similar to a capacitor or battery). The desalination capacity, power consumption and device scalability can be optimized by modulating the water flow characteristics between the electrodes, properties of the electrode material and CDI cell and control circuit design amongst others. CDI is energy efficient and cost-effective device especially for brackish water desalination with minimum wastage of water during regeneration cycles unlike other more popular technologies like reverse osmosis. Having small footprints and no moving parts in the devices, remote use of CDI with solar powered alternatives is a reality.
Our group has been working on membrane-free capacitive deionization for two decades and we will present developments made during the last two years including a newly developed model to predict adsorption/desorption characteristics and insights into our unique flexible carbon based membrane-free spiral electrode design to effectively improve deionization efficiencies and reduce fouling. Some results on the scaled prototypes that have been running to desalinate brackish water from the Baltic sea will also be presented and discussed.

Dr. Joydeep Dutta is a Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology since 2015 and is the head of the Functional Materials Group in the Department of Applied Physics. After completing his PhD in 1990, he did Post-Doctoral work at the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL, Japan) and at Ecole Polytechnique (France) before moving to Switzerland in 1993 where he was associated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) until 2003 following which he joined Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand. He served as the Vice President (Academic Affairs), Director of the Center of Excellence in Nanotechnology and Professor in Nanotechnology at AIT. Finally, before coming to KTH, he was Chair Professor in Nanotechnology for Water Desalination and other applications in Sultan Qaboos University, Oman from 2011-2015. His broad research interests encompass development of sustainable nanomaterials for planetcare including, photocatalysis and electrocatalysis and saline or impaired water treatments as well as energy production by water splitting and blue energy generation. Prof. Dutta is an award winning author (Choice award for Outstanding Academic title of 2010 from American Library Association) of the book “Fundamentals of Nanotechnology”. He has over 200 original research publications, 11 chapters in Science & Technology reference books, edited several books receiving 11,000+ citations (h-index 52; google scholar), 5 patents and has delivered over 100 invited and keynote lectures. He is in the editorial board of a few journals and regularly referees articles in international journals. He is the chairman of the board of Stockholm Water Technology AB producing spirally wound capacitive deionization modules integrated into solutions ranging from water desalination to urban mining.

Speaker Day 3 (Thursday, 22 October 2020)

Dr. Venkataramana Sridhar

Diplomate, American Academy of Water Resources Engineers Biological Systems Engineering Department, Virginia Tech Blacksburg, Virginia 24061; Tel: (540) 231-1797; Fax: 540-231-3199; vsri@vt.edu bse.ve.edu

Progress Towards Integrated Modeling of Food-Energy-Water Systems: Success and Challenges

Dr. Venkataramana Sridhar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at
Virginia Tech. Dr. Sridhar was working as an Associate Professor in Civil Engineering at Boise State
University. Prior to joining Boise State, he was a research faculty at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and
Postdoc at University of Washington. Dr. Sridhar earned his Ph.D. in Biosystems Engineering at Oklahoma
State University in 2001. Dr. Sridhar is a hydrologist and conducts modeling research to understand the
impact of climate change on hydrology and water resources, water management, drought and flood
modeling. Dr. Sridhar’s research group designed, developed, and refined a suite of computational
hydrological models to generate datasets that were translated into an operational decision support system
for many river basins in the conterminous U.S. This helps to avoid the conflicts between water managers
and water users thus benefitting the agriculture sector. It is noteworthy that these decision support tools
were used by the local stakeholders to examine alternative water resource management scenarios,
considering various environmental and socio-economic conditions.
Ongoing projects in his lab on the assessment of future precipitation, temperature, snowmelt,
streamflow, soil moisture, droughts and floods in several regions including the Mid-Atlantic US, Caucasus
and Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia are expected to provide insights into planning and managing
both land and water resources in many river basins. These projects inform improved solutions to avoid
water demand conflicts and improve potential yields from agriculture, ensuring a vibrant agricultural
industry and enhancing food security.

Dr. Sridhar also co-leads the NASA-funded Mekong Basin project to study the coupling of land, water, and
livelihoods under a changing Climate and water-energy-food nexus in the Lower Mekong River basin. This
international partnership covering Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam provides opportunities to build Dr. Sridhar’s research program and contribute to capacity building in host countries and facilitating knowledge sharing in an interdisciplinary framework. Through an NSF-Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE)-funded project, Dr. Sridhar is currently working to estimate pollutant loads to rivers and streams in urban watersheds in six countries, which includes Sweden, Switzerland, China, India, Philippines, and Portugal. He closely works with National Institute of Technology Warangal funded by the SPARC program in India and serves as an Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Water Resources Development and Management, IIT Roorkee.

Dr. Sridhar has served as the principal investigator or co-investigator on 15 research projects with grants over $2.5 Million to perform research related to various topics in water resources. He has published more than 160 research articles, including 75 peer-reviewed journal articles and 85 technical papers at conferences and several invited talks nationally and internationally. He is a Registered Professional Engineer in Idaho and Nebraska and a member of American Society of Civil Engineers, American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, American Meteorological Society, American Water Resources Association, American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Sridhar is a Diplomate of American Academy of Water Resources Engineers. He was a Review Panel Member, Horton Award Committee, American Geophysical Union, 2009-12. He has trained six postdoctoral researchers, over 20 graduate and undergraduate students, and overseas research scholars.