Pooja Shah, Senior Consultant, DNV’s Renewable and Power Grids Group
Pooja Shah is a senior consultant in DNV’s Renewable and Power Grids Group. She leads project development and owner’s engineering for the energy storage and emerging technologies advisory. Pooja also supports business development and technical due diligence for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. She’s been in the clean energy sector for seven years. Outside of her work, Pooja enjoys swimming and reading. Pooja has been honored with the NextGen Leader Award by the Kansas City Business Journal, Young Athena Award by the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, and the Mass Transit 40 under 40 Award by the Mass Transit Magazine for driving innovation for a just, equitable, and inclusive clean energy future. She was recently featured in a book titled “Love Your Mother” written by Mallory Mcduff.
HOW IT ALL STARTED
Growing up in South Asia and living through extreme heat and air pollution, Pooja became curious about the sources of these extreme weather events and air pollutants and the link to climate change. She realized a key contributor to air pollution was emissions from energy production powered primarily by fossil fuels. With this understanding, Pooja was determined to spark a change by directing her career to the clean energy sector. Like pursuing any other mission, Pooja had to navigate her way around getting into clean energy. Aware of her problem-solving and analytical skills, she decided engineering was the best way to integrate her skill sets with her mission to impact the clean energy industry. She completed her undergraduate degree in power electronics and furthered her education by completing a master’s in Energy Systems Engineering focusing on renewable energy and sustainable enterprise.
THE JOURNEY FROM ENGINEERING TO CONSULTING
Early in her career, Pooja worked as an electrical engineer in the engineering and construction industry, focusing on utility-scale solar and energy storage projects. She gained hands-on engineering and design experience and honed her technical skills. With the help of mentors, she also started strengthening her leadership, communication, and collaboration skills. In 2021, The Clean Energy Leadership Institute accepted Pooja into its fellowship program. During the 8-month fellowship program, Pooja grew her expertise beyond her technical skills and learnt how to think critically about current energy policy and market structures, examine existing and historical inequities, identify barriers to clean energy deployment and innovation, recognize leadership moments and stepping up into leadership roles, develop holistic solutions toward an equitable energy transition and build the relationships necessary to scale clean energy solutions. Reflecting on that experience, she explains how the fellowship helped her grow her network and develop a leadership mindset required to look at the big picture. Shortly after, Pooja moved into a senior consultant position at DNV where she puts her technical and leadership skills together to accelerate a just and equitable transition to clean energy.
WHAT IS THE MISSION?
Pooja is very passionate about addressing climate change through clean energy. Her strategy for achieving this involves understanding the current issues with the various aspects of the energy trilemma; energy affordability, energy equity, and energy sustainability. You will find her involved with organizations that help accelerate the energy transition equitably and take climate action. A good example is the Clean Energy Leadership Institute (CELI) that Pooja supports, where she recently served as the Selections Lead for the New York Cohort for CELI’s flagship fellowship program. Being an alumnus of the 2021 national cohort herself, Pooja is happy to be involved with the organization in different capacities as it aims to bring about a new kind of energy leadership where diverse groups of emerging leaders come together with their unique expertise to create solutions drive an equitable, decarbonized, and resilient clean energy future and address climate change.
Pooja is also involved with the Global Women’s Network for Energy Transition (GWNET), where she helps mentor women in emerging countries on energy storage. In her community in Kansas City, she works with various organizations at the board level to drive the conversation around building a more resilient and sustainable future and mentoring students of color toward STEM careers.
ALIGNING WITH WiRE’S VALUES
Pooja feels honored to have received the Equality in Energy Transition - Emerging Leader Award from WiRE to increase the representation of both women and women of color in the industry. She wants to use this platform to share her story with others and help young girls and emerging professionals see an ally doing the work. She hopes this will inspire them to find their place in the climate and clean energy industry. Pooja also iterates that an open mind, flexibility, and honing your unique hard and soft skills are vital to a successful career and bring diversity and innovation to the clean energy industry. Pooja believes everyone can be impactful where they are without needing a specific platform, or position, or receiving big name awards. She recommends you can start right where you are in your community.
A KEY STRATEGY
Over the course of her career, Pooja has had mentors and allies who have guided her and helped her navigate the challenges she has faced as a woman of color in the industry. She owes her success in the industry thus far to her mentors, champions, advocates, and sponsors. However, Pooja was intentional about building a strong community of champions and mentors to help her hone the necessary skills required to make an outsized impact. She advises that establishing allies and having a community within and outside of your organizations is one of the best ways to be proactive and successful in moving forward and making a difference.
CLOSING REMARKS
In terms of what she intends to dedicate herself to in 2023 and going-forward, Pooja is focused on ensuring deployment of clean energy solutions by taking them from the conceptual stage to working solutions to help accelerate the energy transition. Specifically, she’s working on several energy storage projects and enabling the de-risking of innovative business models and technologies in the transportation electrification sector. Pooja believes there is no silver bullet to the energy transition, and we should start focusing on solutions available to us right now while also pursuing innovation and emerging technologies.
For anyone looking to understand more about the clean energy sector and climate change, Pooja recommends the books Short Circuiting Policy by Dr. Leah Stokes, Save Us by Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, and All We Can Save – Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson.
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