India’s cooling demand is rising rapidly, already contributing significantly to electricity use and peak-load growth. Cooling-as-a-Service (CaaS) shifts cooling from equipment ownership to performance-based delivery, enabling affordability, efficiency, and peak-load management. Aligned with the India Cooling Action Plan, this session brings together cross-sector expertise to examine how CaaS can decouple rising comfort needs from energy use, peak demand, and emissions, focusing on market readiness, policy enablers, and scalable pathways for public buildings, commercial spaces, and urban developments.

• Arjun P Gupta Founder and CEO, Smart Joules
• Amit Sahu Head, Sales - CBS, NWE Region, Grundfos
• Aseem Goyal General Manager, Business Development, Tabreed India
• Babu Panneerselvam Head of Innovation, Cooling, Thermax Ltd
• Manjunath M D Head, Life Cycle Solution, Carrier HVAC
• Piyush Sharma Deputy Head, Energy Efficiency Programmes, GIZ India

Session Co-curated with Kazam

India’s rapidly growing EV ecosystem for two- and three-wheelers depends on stronger residential charging, especially with the rise of delivery fleets where access remains a critical bottleneck. This session highlights the importance of home charging, the regulatory and infrastructure barriers in housing societies, technology and policy enhancements, and how enabling residential charging can boost fleet efficiency, reduce costs, and accelerate last-mile logistics electrification.

• Akshay Shekhar Co-Founder and CEO, Kazam
• Jaideep Saraswat Associate Director, Clean Power, Electric Mobility and Emerging Technologies, Vasudha Foundation India
• Pradeep Aggarwal General Manager, EV cell and Open Access, BSES Rajdhani Power Ltd
• Sumedh Agarwal Director, Smart and Resilient Power and Mobility (SRPM), Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy (AEEE)

Over the next half decade, the most competitive Indian sectors will not be defined by what they build or operate, but by how efficiently they convert energy into value. India does not face an energy shortage problem. It faces an efficiency execution problem. Across large, energy-intensive operational environments, spanning public infrastructure, industrial operations, and commercial ecosystems—every unoptimized system represents silent capital leakage. Energy efficiency is no longer a sustainability aspiration; it is a profit recovery lever, a decarbonisation strategy, and a prerequisite for delivering the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision. The leaders of the next decade will be those who command energy, not merely monitor it, using automation, digital twins, IoT, and AI systems that can predict, decide, and act in real time across complex, always-on operations. This session brings together public-sector operators and industry practitioners to move the conversation decisively from policy intent to on-ground execution. At its core, the discussion explores how next-generation Enterprise Energy Management Systems (EEMS), integrating electrical, thermal, and digital infrastructure, are becoming mission-critical operating systems for India’s large-scale built environments and production ecosystems.

• Rajesh Nilkanth Shinde Executive Director (Technical), Airport Authority of India (AAI)
• Vikram Gandotra President, IEEMA

Session Co-curated with INDEE3

India’s refrigerant transition is accelerating as the country prepares to phase down HFCs under the Kigali Amendment. This session explores policy frameworks, emerging low-GWP refrigerant technologies, and sector readiness, highlighting opportunities and challenges for a smooth, economically viable transition aligned with India’s climate and energy goals.

• Aditya Narayan Singh Scientist ‘F’ and Director, Ozone Cell, MoEFCC, Govt of India
• Milind G Mohile Vice President and Head, Strategy and Growth, Triveni Turbines
• Mani Sankar Dasgupta Senior Professor, Mechanical Engineering, BITS Pilani
• Santosh Saini Principal Research Associate, AEEE
• Sonal Kumar Programme Lead, CEEW
• Sukumar Devotta Former Director, National Environmetal Engineering Research Institute (NEERI)

This session delves into the critical barriers that hinder large-scale Energy Efficiency (EE) deployment across public systems—particularly municipal water pumping and building cooling. It will highlight innovative financial structures that can make EE interventions bankable and replicable, and explore pathways to unlock sustainable, non-sovereign financing to accelerate adoption.

• Ananya Mukherjee Senior Programme Lead, CEEW
• Manya Ranjan Co-founder, Two Point O Capital
• Naim Keruwala Regional Director, South & West Asia Regions and Mayoral Engagement, C40 Cities
• Pramod Kumar Singh Senior Director, Research and Programmes, Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy (AEEE)

Session Co-curated with UNEP

As the world’s second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables, India incurs nearly 18% post-harvest losses due to weak farm-level aggregation and pre-cooling infrastructure. Developing new, sustainable packhouses is critical to address this gap by enabling efficient pre-cooling, grading, sorting, and aggregation close to production centres. Energy-efficient and renewable energy–powered packhouses can reduce losses, improve produce quality, strengthen market access, and enhance farmer incomes. Aligned with the India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP) and Doubling Farmers’ Income goals, this workshop will convene policymakers, industry experts, and practitioners to focus on greenfield sustainable packhouses, exploring technology options, financing models, and capacity-building needs. The discussions will identify actionable pathways, investment opportunities, and policy enablers to scale adoption nationwide.

• Angshuman Siddhanta Sustainable Cold-chain Expert, UNEP
• Khushboo Gupta Principal Research Associate, AEEE
• Sudhir Mahajan CEO, National Cooperative Union of India

India’s affordable housing challenge is increasingly shaped by climate risk, rising energy costs, and the dominance of self-built construction. This session examines the systemic barriers that prevent self-built homes from being climate-resilient and energy-efficient, drawing on evidence from field studies. It will explore gaps across design, construction materials, skills, funding and policy, and how the housing delivery ecosystem can enable practical technical, financial, and policy interventions to strengthen future self-built affordable housing programmes.

• Anurag Bajpai Director, GreenTree Global
• Ashok B Lall Founder, Ashok B Lall Architects
• Autif Sayyed Project Lead – South Asia, Green and Resilient Buildings, IFC
• Dharini Sridharan Principal Research Associate, AEEE
• Prasad Vaidya Senior Fellow, AEEE; Director, SDI
• Sumedha Malviya Program Head, Building Decarbonisation, WRI India

Precise, problem-driven articulation is critical to accelerate climate-tech innovation in the built environment. It reduces wasted R&D, speeds pilot adoption, lowers market risk, and attracts investors. This session will explore co-developing high-impact problem statements to shorten time-to-market and scale climate-resilient solutions.

• Aneesh Kadyan Senior Executive Director, Property Management Operations, CBRE South Asia Pvt Ltd
• Aun Abdullah Vice President, Lodha
• Gian Modgil Team Lead, HCL ClimaForce Fund
• Mili Majumdar Managing Director, GBCI India; Senior Vice President, Innovation and Research, US Green Building Council
• Priyank Garg ex-Managing Partner, IAN Alpha fund

Don't just plan it. Build it. Decode the DNA of a District using granular data.

The Challenge
Cities are complex puzzles of energy, heat, and infrastructure. AEEE is opening access to its Geospatial Open Building Stack (GOBS), an open, high-resolution dataset of building-level attributes available at gobs.aeee.in—and challenging you to de-code these layers.

We challenge you to get hands-on with the data, perform rigorous analysis, and demonstrate technical proofs-of-concept that transform how we plan, power, and protect our urban regions.

Know more and participate

This session explores how high-resolution building data—like the Geospatial Open Building Stack (GOBS)—can transform urban governance. Experts will discuss actionable use cases for energy efficiency, heat resilience, and disaster planning, examining how granular insights can drive policy interventions and decarbonise India’s rapidly growing cities.

• Abhishek Ranjan CEO, BSES Rajdhani Power Ltd
• Hitesh Vaidya Former Director, National Institute of Urban Affairs
• Rahul Walawalkar Founder and President, Netzero Energy Transition Association
• Satish Kumar President and Executive Director, AEEE
• Sumedha Malviya Program Head, Building Decarbonisation, WRI India