Ep78 How Solar Forecasting Reduces Risk for Investors with Harsh Goenka, Solargis

Unlock the secrets of solar bankability in this episode with Harsh Goenka from Solargis, a leading solar data and software provider. We explore how high-quality satellite data and AI-driven forecasting reduce investment risk and manage weather variability. Discover how precise resource assessment helps grid operators transition from coal to reliable, base-load renewable energy by optimising battery storage. Learn why accurate solar data is the essential "fuel" for scaling climate finance and navigating extreme weather risks like hailstorms in emerging markets.

ABOUT HARSH: Harsh Goenka is the Regional Sales Director for Europe and APAC at Solargis. An engineer by training, Harsh brings over a decade of expertise in the renewable energy sector, specialising in bridging the gap between technical solar engineering and financial risk assessment. Prior to his current leadership role, he was instrumental in mentoring commercial teams and forging strategic partnerships with major institutional investors and IPPs globally. He remains committed to advancing data-driven decision-making to accelerate the global transition to clean energy.

HOST, PRODUCTION, ARTWORK: Joseph Jacobelli | MUSIC: Ep76 onward excerpts from Vivaldi’s La Follia, played by Luca Jacobelli.

Chapters

• 0:00 "Coming Up"
• 1:25 Why Solar Data Matters
• 3:28 Inside Solargis’ Work
• 5:31 Accuracy and Investor Risk
• 8:59 Forecasting to Replace Coal
• 17:38 Grid Variability Challenges
• 22:35 Climate Risk and Extremes
• 28:56 AI and Solar Forecasting

Transcript

Episode Transcript

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: THIS AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED TRANSCRIPT IS PROVIDED FOR CONVENIENCE ONLY AND IS NOT THE OFFICIAL OR COMPLETE RECORD OF THE PROCEEDINGS. THE ORIGINAL AUDIO/VIDEO RECORDING REMAINS THE SOLE AUTHORITATIVE RECORD, AND NO RELIANCE SHOULD BE PLACED ON THIS TRANSCRIPT FOR ANY LEGAL, EVIDENTIARY, OR DECISION‑MAKING PURPOSES.

Ep78 How Solar Forecasting Reduces Risk for Investors, Harsh Goenka, Solargis

[00:00:00] Harsh Goenka: I think it is important to move ahead with times because the legacy approaches that have been used for the last five, 10 years, especially in the renewables, won't work in the next five years, especially because we are moving from an era of subsidised renewable energies where you were paid for the electricity irrespective of when it was generated, so all you cared about was, okay, I'm putting my plant over here and what's my annual generation going to be, and I'm happy. But we are moving towards an era where it just doesn't matter how much electricity you generate, but it also matters when you generate that electricity. So when the time aspect of it comes into the equation, the energy systems have to be more sophisticated, more complex. You need to combine different sources of renewable energies together, and the legacy approaches of yesterday simply won't work.

[00:01:02] Narrator: Welcome to Asia Climate Finance, your front row seat to the policies, investments, and actors shaping climate, business and finance across Asia Pacific. Subscribe now so others find this essential guide to Asia's climate economy and note the disclaimers at the end. Now over to the host, analyst, investor, and author Joseph Jacobelli.

[00:01:25] Joseph Jacobelli: Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you're listening from. Welcome to episode 78 of Asia Climate Finance. Today we dive into the world of solar data. It is a key anchor of the energy transition. We often talk about building solar farms, but we rarely discuss the fuel behind them, namely the sun itself.

[00:01:45] Our guest is Harsh Goenka from Solargis, a leading solar data and software provider. Harsh is an expert in solar resource assessment and forecasting. He actually refers to his company as a credit rating agency for the sun. This data is absolutely vital. Accurate figures reduce risk for investors. They also help grid operators balance supply and demand.

[00:02:12] We will explore how high-quality data can bridge the investment gap in Asia Pacific. Harsh explains how AI is refining weather models. We discuss why forecasting helps us move away from coal. By predicting solar output, we can manage batteries more effectively. This helps provide steady baseload power even when the sun is not shining.

[00:02:36] It is a fascinating look at making our green future more bankable. As always, for comments and ideas, please email the address at the top of the show notes.

[00:02:47] Joseph Jacobelli: Hello, Harsh, and how are you today?

[00:02:50] Harsh Goenka: I am great. Thank you for having me on the show.

[00:02:53] Joseph Jacobelli: Thank you so much for making it. It is a topic that I'm actually fascinated about. It's obviously very focused on solar and on data, but given that solar is, I think everybody would agree, the fastest-growing form of renewable energy in the world, not just China. It's getting cheaper, it's getting quicker to put it all up. So I think it's very important. Harsh, maybe we can just start simply by a very quick introduction of yourself and maybe your company as well, because not everybody may be very familiar with the company.

[00:03:28] Harsh Goenka: Sure. So, you can think of Solargis as a credit rating agency for the sun. So we tell our clients how much sun there is, which is useful in the project development phase to understand the feasibility of the project, what is going to be the return on investment and so on.

[00:03:49] And once the project is operational, we help our clients understand whether the project is performing adequately, and we also support grid operators with forecasting so that they can balance the supply and demand on the grid by knowing accurately what the solar generation is going to be for the next hours or next days.

[00:04:11] Joseph Jacobelli: Do you also provide solar data ahead of the project? Say, I want to put up a solar farm in France, and I need to work out the solar irradiation data. Is that something also that you do, or you just do it post‑project?

[00:04:30] Harsh Goenka: Yeah, that's at the core of what we do. So essentially, we are providing data, software, and professional consultancy services. Most of the work we are doing is in a SaaS business model or a data‑as‑a‑service business model, and some ad hoc consultancy along with that.

[00:04:53] Joseph Jacobelli: Based on a little bit of homework I was able to do, because again, I wasn't familiar with your company, apologies, but Solargis has built a reputation for providing some of the most accurate solar resource data globally. How is this quantified? How do we quantify accuracy in this particular sector, and how does this perception translate into real‑world benefits for the developers and investors in the Asia Pacific region specifically? I mean, not just Asia Pacific, but given that we try to focus on Asia, where the weather variability can be quite challenging.

[00:05:31] Harsh Goenka: So the data that we are providing to our customers, that's all modelled data where we use satellite imagery as a primary input when modelling the data. And to understand how accurate that modelled data is, what we've done is we are comparing the modelled data with quality‑controlled ground measurements at hundreds of locations globally, several of them in the Asia Pacific region as well. And when we do this comparison, we look at what is the bias of the modelled data versus the ground measurements, what is the root mean square error, and if we have several validation points, then it helps us understand what is the spread of the bias or the error, which can be translated into the uncertainty of the modelled estimates.

[00:06:22] Joseph Jacobelli: Mm‑hmm. Understood. Now, Asia Pacific specifically, I mean, we're talking about 50% of the population, 50% of energy consumption, and some of the energy transition estimates put annual spending somewhere around, well, a minimum of 1 trillion. There are all sorts of numbers out there, but I think it's very difficult to come up with an accurate number. But let's just say it's a minimum of 1 trillion in climate investment. Yet current flows fall quite short of that. We're talking about a few hundreds of billions, but definitely not even reaching the minimum of 1 trillion. How does Solargis see its role in bridging this gap by improving the quality of the data and the risk assessment for financiers?

[00:07:13] Harsh Goenka: So, as investors like low risk, right?

[00:07:17] Joseph Jacobelli: I'm an investor. That's what I like as well.

[00:07:19] Harsh Goenka: So, if we have low uncertainty around the solar resource, which is the fuel behind these energy systems, then that translates into lower surprises. So I'll give you an example where not having accurate data can make things go wrong.

[00:07:37] So recently we have been speaking with a solar project developer in the Philippines, and their power plants have been operational for a couple of years now, and they say that their actual production is falling short by 5%, 10% compared to what they had anticipated when they were developing the project.

[00:08:02] Joseph Jacobelli: And that's quite a lot on a long‑term cash flow basis. I mean, 5% is massive.

[00:08:07] Harsh Goenka: Yeah, exactly. So part of it could be because of simply year‑to‑year volatility in the solar resource. Maybe the last year or so was cloudier and less sunny. But part of it also has to do with simply being optimistic with the initial yield or resource estimate going into the investment. So that's why it's so important to work with high‑accuracy, low‑uncertainty data and assumptions when you're investing.

[00:08:38] Joseph Jacobelli: Got it. Now, many countries in the region are still heavily reliant on coal‑fired power plants. How do you personally think better solar forecasting and performance analysis can accelerate the shift towards renewables in markets such as, just to pick some of the bigger ones, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam?

[00:08:59] Harsh Goenka: So I think solar forecasting plays a very important role in the transition away from coal. Let me take the example of India, right? So you may have seen in the news reports that this year the government is talking about cancelling roughly 40 to 50 gigawatts of projects which were awarded in auctions, but they haven't been able to sign the power purchase agreements with the…

[00:09:29] Joseph Jacobelli: Mm.

[00:09:31] Harsh Goenka: And this is despite the rates that were arrived at in these auctions being less than what it costs for coal‑powered electricity. The reason why this is happening is because typically in these countries the electricity peak is happening in the evening hours, and that's when the sun is not shining.

[00:09:54] So there is a lot of surplus solar electricity during the day, but we also need electricity between 6 to 9pm.

[00:10:05] So the way India is dealing with this is there is a big push towards hybrid projects where you're combining solar, wind, and batteries together to deliver baseload power.

[00:10:19] Because if you really want to transition away from coal, we need to go towards not just providing intermittent renewable energy, but we need to provide baseload renewable energy. And for that to happen effectively, solar forecasting plays a vital role because then you can take smart decisions on when to charge the battery, when to discharge the battery. Of course, you can go and build a bigger battery, but that increases the cost. So solar forecasting can help reduce the system cost while delivering baseload power.

[00:10:51] Joseph Jacobelli: Right. So you're basically saying that thanks to the forecasting you can optimise your usage of the battery, or at least at the very initial stage say, well, we need X‑size battery as opposed to a much bigger battery or a smaller battery. Got it.

[00:11:08] Harsh Goenka: Exactly.

[00:11:08] Joseph Jacobelli: So, Solargis covers the entire lifecycle of a solar project, right from site selection to daily operations. Which stage do you find most critical for investors in Asia Pacific and why?

[00:11:26] Harsh Goenka: I would say the most critical phase is the pre‑construction or financing phase of the project. And this is because renewable energy projects are all about upfront capital, right? Once you have the steel on the ground, you are stuck with it for the next 25, 30 years. So if you're going to make mistakes in the development stage, you have to live with it for the entire lifetime of the project.

[00:11:55] So that's why the biggest impact we can deliver is in the development stage of the project.

[00:12:02] Joseph Jacobelli: Right, right. And it's interesting you mention the length of projects because people forget. I think when I first started covering solar back in, I think it was 2006, very early days when the utilisation rates of the solar PV capacity were not as high as they are today, but I remember that everybody was forecasting 15 to 20 years. That was like the standard, right? And then the standard got to like 20 years. And very recently, because we've got more experience with solar PV farms, everybody's finding out, oh, hold on, but this actually, like battery usage, by 20, 30 years it's not zero. It could be 60%, could be 70% still utilisation.

[00:12:48] So actually the life of the panels can be a lot longer than originally expected, and I think most people forget that.

[00:12:55] Harsh Goenka: Yeah, absolutely. So most panel manufacturers do offer 25–30 year warranties these days, and I've even seen IPPs which have a longer‑term focus. They try to think in 30‑year, 40‑year perspectives as well when looking into investing into these projects.

[00:13:14] Joseph Jacobelli: Right. You just assume a percentage degradation of the panel, maybe a little bit more conservative, a little bit higher, just to be a little bit conservative.

[00:13:23] So Solargis data has been validated at more than something like 1500 sites worldwide when I looked at it. Could you share examples of how validation in Asia Pacific markets has helped to build confidence among financial institutions and institutional investors?

[00:13:45] Harsh Goenka: Sure. There was one example in Japan where we had a client who was developing a portfolio of solar projects, and their aim was to develop and sell it on to institutional investors.

[00:14:00] And when that transaction was being negotiated, there was some confusion or difference of opinions on what the solar resource at the site was, because the other counterparties were looking at some publicly available resource data which had more conservative numbers, and our client felt that, okay, if they went ahead with those public numbers, then it reduces the transaction value or the value of the assets. So what we did in this case was we had the client measure the solar radiation using radiation sensors on site for a period of one year at several of their power plants. And after we collected one year of measurements, we were able to compare that with our modelled data. And at all the 10 sites we had excellent match with the measurements, very close to zero bias. So this gave a lot of confidence to all stakeholders to go ahead with Solargis for the transaction purposes.

[00:15:07] Joseph Jacobelli: Because of the matching. Right. And I'm just curious, just a side question, just personal curiosity, the sensors at the site, is that common and is that expensive? Do many people do it or is it not that common?

[00:15:22] Harsh Goenka: So the sensors at the site are very common once the project is already operational. It is not that common in the pre‑construction phase. But we do always recommend our clients, wherever it is feasible and they have time, to deploy them already in the development stage, particularly when you're working on a very large project, anything above a hundred megawatts or so.

[00:15:46] Joseph Jacobelli: Right. And I presume the cost these days is not significant, right.

[00:15:51] Harsh Goenka: Yeah, we are just talking about tens of thousands of euros to run a one‑year measurement campaign. So compared to the benefit it brings, because even a 1% reduction in uncertainty could increase the net present value of a project by millions of dollars.

[00:16:09] Joseph Jacobelli: Yes, of course. Sorry, that was just a side question. My personal curiosity.

[00:16:13] Now, climate finance experts often highlight the importance of transparency and disclosure standards. How does Solargis ensure that its methodologies remain transparent and bankable for lenders and regulators in Asia Pacific or the rest of the world?

[00:16:33] Harsh Goenka: So transparency is actually one of the core values of our organisation. And our founders essentially have a scientific background. They're scientists.

[00:16:45] And so a lot of what we do is scientifically peer‑reviewed. We present all our methodology in scientific publications, in papers, and we have a very extensive documentation on our website and knowledge base where all the models, the validation results, everything is published.

[00:17:04] So it's out there for everyone to see. So we do strongly believe in transparency, and we try to share everything that is not extremely proprietary.

[00:17:16] Joseph Jacobelli: Right, right, right, right, right. Another kind of related topic, Harsh, is talking about grids. And this grid modernisation or expansion is needed pretty much anywhere in the world. Europe, Europeans complain about it. The Chinese are working hard at it. India, Indonesia is quite behind in trying to accelerate grid investments as well.

[00:17:38] So grid integration and variability are major concerns in many jurisdictions around the world, including in Asia. How does your forecasting technology help the developers or the regulators manage these risks while keeping costs under control?

[00:17:58] Harsh Goenka: Yeah, you are absolutely right that variability is a big challenge. And even more so in smaller Asian countries, some of which are island countries where there has been a surge in renewables. And renewables are starting to form a substantial share of the total energy mix. It is quite important here for grid operators to understand if there's going to be a sudden ramp, which means a sudden increase or decrease in the solar power in the next 30 minutes or an hour, so that they can accordingly schedule and manage the other sources of energy and the demand that is connected to the grid.

[00:18:38] So I'll give you one example from earlier this year. You might have read about it in the news. There was a nationwide blackout in Sri Lanka. It's not so widely known as the blackout in Spain.

[00:18:52] But if you read the news report, it was funny because the blackout was apparently blamed on monkeys, where the news report suggested that some monkeys entered a transformer station and messed up something. But if you read between the lines, what was not said in the news reports was that this event actually happened on Sunday morning at 11:00am. So this is when it's a very sunny day and solar power is at full strength. And Sunday is also when the demand for electricity is at the lowest.

[00:19:29] So you do have a situation where roughly 50% of the total electricity of the country is being met by solar power. And then in such a situation, if you have a sudden ramp event, then it can create a blackout situation. So it is an extremely challenging issue that the countries will have to think how to deal with. And a good forecasting system plays an essential role, especially in countries which have a lot of distributed solar, as was the case in Sri Lanka, because if you have a few big solar power plants, then it's still manageable. But when you have thousands of small rooftop solar systems, then sometimes the grid operators don't even know what is connected. They don't have real‑time data on that, and a lot of the consumption of the solar is happening behind the meter. So it increases the uncertainty of the accurate solar forecast. Same thing is happening now in Pakistan, where officially only two gigawatts or so of solar is connected to the grid. In reality, we have something like 20 gigawatts of solar connected.

[00:20:43] Joseph Jacobelli: Yes, yes. It's massive. But I think places like Australia are coping a little bit better. Although Australia itself has grid modernisation issues, it seems that because they've invested quite a lot in batteries, they seem to be doing a little bit better than other places.

[00:21:05] Harsh Goenka: Definitely. So they have a much more advanced system of forecasting. They're investing a lot in storage. But despite that, even in Australia, curtailment has been on the rise, not across the country, but there have been specific regions which have seen higher curtailment. And this has definitely had an impact on investor confidence. And people are more hesitant to invest in solar‑only projects.

[00:21:35] Joseph Jacobelli: Yes. It's something good happening, but it's actually hurting the projects, which is a little bit weird if you think about it. But moving on to a question which is close to my heart. I care quite a bit about climate risk. And the reason behind that, I'm not sure if you agree, is that there's a lot of people, there's climate change deniers, blah, blah, blah, but climate risk is there, whether you call it extreme events risk. You're getting floods, wildfires and all the rest.

[00:22:04] And nobody can really argue when your city is getting flooded or your house is getting burned down, although the house may have been there for a hundred years. So what I'm getting at is how do these extreme weather events, which are occurring more and more frequently, actually impact renewable energy projects themselves? I mean, trying to work out the data around that must be incredibly complicated.

[00:22:35] Harsh Goenka: So, yeah, climate change has a significant impact on renewable energy projects themselves. One very well‑known impact is, of course, that of increasing temperatures, which is well studied, well understood. So some people tend to think that, okay, good, higher temperatures are good, but as we know, that's not true.

[00:22:57] The higher the temperature, the lower the efficiency of the solar panels, so this way the productions go down. But besides that, what we have also been seeing is that climate change has been increasing the volatility of the solar resource.

[00:23:13] So just this year, we know that in East Asia, China, and Japan and that part of the world, there were extremely high temperature events seen, but also what accompanied this was very high radiation. So, for example, in the month of July we saw that the global solar radiation was 40% higher than the long‑term average.

[00:23:46] Joseph Jacobelli: Wow.

[00:23:47] Harsh Goenka: Yeah.

[00:23:48] So now seeing something like 20–25% deviation plus or minus month to month, that is normal. But we have a data record of something like 25 years. So this is the first time in the 25‑year history we have seen such a significant anomaly in Japan. And sometimes that's good news for the power plant owners because if there is 40% more solar radiation, we might think that translates to 40% more output. But not always, because that also means you have more curtailment. So some of that electricity is then getting curtailed as well.

[00:24:57] And then the other thing that we are seeing is that the occurrence and intensity of extreme weather events is increasing. So those extreme events that used to happen once in a century, we might see once every 30 years or so. And sometimes we tend to ignore this, but just one recent discussion with a colleague showed me how important this is.

[00:25:20] So recently my colleagues have been working on a hail risk map globally, and I come from the city of Calcutta in West Bengal in India. And in that hail risk map, he showed me, oh, it seems that West Bengal in India has one of the highest hail risks in the world. And I told him, no, that can't be true.

[00:25:41] I grew up there. Yes, there were a few hail events, but nothing serious. Nothing like what we see in Texas. And then he showed me a record that the biggest known hail event with the biggest diameter of the hailstones was in the early 1980s in Bangladesh.

[00:26:00] Joseph Jacobelli: Okay.

[00:26:01] Harsh Goenka: And I was not aware of that fact, because that was even before I was born. So it happened in the early nineties, but who says that it cannot happen five years from now? And so solar power developers need to take into account these kinds of risks. And maybe they go for PV panels with more sturdy glass or have some other safety mechanisms in place so that the design is more resilient. So I do feel that we don't give significant thought when doing the risk assessment to these kinds of things, but we ought to.

[00:26:20] Joseph Jacobelli: No, that's really interesting. I mean, if you would have quizzed me and asked me, biggest hailstone in the world, where would it have been, I would have definitely picked a different country. I would not have thought about Bangladesh. But…

[00:26:32] Now, you work with hundreds of organisations all around the world. Can I ask what partnerships or collaborations you are especially prioritising in the Asia area to scale up renewable deployment and attract climate capital?

[00:26:50] Harsh Goenka: So we have been partnering with government agencies on certain projects. We also tend to partner with various technical advisors who are in turn working with lenders, banks, to do the due diligence of the projects. So on the front of government agencies, one recent example that comes to my mind is we have worked with the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources in Indonesia, where we have done a detailed geospatial mapping for the JAMALI grid, which is the Jawa–Madura–Bali electricity grid. And we looked at different layers, like of course the solar resource annual availability, but also the solar resource variability, the terrain, the nearness to the substations, protected areas and so on. And we came up with a list of 140 sites which are suitable for building large‑scale solar power plants and ranked them based on the various scores.

[00:28:00] So this is one example of an exercise we have been doing. We also are looking forward to partnering with grid operators in the region to help them with accurate forecasting, because what we have seen is that when solar power is still in a very nascent stage, maybe 2% or 5% of the energy mix, still forecasting is not taken so seriously. But as soon as it becomes 10–15% of the energy mix, it becomes a very important aspect to focus on. And so this is another area. So it's not one specific area, but we are on the lookout for various kinds of partnerships in the region.

[00:28:38] Joseph Jacobelli: So now that's quite interesting. Now we’ve got to move to the question of the time, so to speak, which is AI, artificial intelligence. Now it's increasingly being used to optimise renewable projects from site selection to predictive maintenance.

[00:28:56] How is your company integrating AI into its solar resource assessment and forecasting tools? And what specific opportunities do you see in Asia, in the Asia markets where data quality and grid stability are really pressing challenges?

[00:29:13] Harsh Goenka: Yeah. So we are thinking how to utilise AI across the project lifecycle from site selection to project operation, but the most immediate project where we see AI being helpful is forecasting. So here today we are using multiple different numerical weather prediction models. Each model provides a slightly different weather or radiation forecast, and until recently we had been doing some kind of weighted averaging or a simple combination of the different models. But AI opens up new possibilities because with the help of AI we can try to look at the historical performance of different weather models at each location and create very customised, site‑specific combinations which are empowered by AI on how we blend the different numerical weather prediction models to provide a more accurate forecast.

[00:30:18] Joseph Jacobelli: Understood. That's great. One final question, Harsh, which is your long‑term views. I mean, you've been around this sector for a while now.

[00:30:30] In terms of the next five, 10, or even 20 years, what innovations in solar resource assessment or forecasting do you think would be most transformative for the Asia markets?

[00:30:43] Harsh Goenka: So I've been in the energy industry for a bit more than a decade, and my observation has been that the energy industry can be sometimes conservative and slow to adopt new innovation.

[00:30:59] Joseph Jacobelli: Yes.

[00:31:00] Harsh Goenka: And that's very understandable because, as we discussed, the renewable energy industry and energy industry as a whole is a lot about upfront capital, and you don't want to disturb things when they seem to work relatively well.

[00:31:16] Joseph Jacobelli: Just don't fix it if it's not broken.

[00:31:19] Harsh Goenka: Yeah. And so I think the innovations that will be adopted over the next five, 10 years, I think they already exist today. The technology is there. I do hope that the adoption will happen in the next five years and not the next 10 years. And I think it is important to move ahead with times because the legacy approaches that have been used for the last five, 10 years, especially in the renewables, won't work in the next five years, especially because we are moving from an era of subsidised renewable energies where you were paid for the electricity irrespective of when it was generated, so all you cared about was, okay, I'm putting my plant over here and what's my annual generation going to be, and I'm happy. But we are moving towards an era where it just doesn't matter how much electricity you generate, but it also matters when you generate that electricity. So when the time aspect of it comes into the equation, the energy systems have to be more sophisticated, more complex. You need to combine different sources of renewable energies together, and the legacy approaches of yesterday simply won't work. You have to adopt.

[00:32:42] Joseph Jacobelli: Right, right. And also perhaps I don't want to put words in your mouth because you're the expert. I'm not, I'm just a finance guy. I'm not a data guy, a data specialist. But isn't it also true that although the overall capacity, say 20 years ago [00:33:00] was quite low, there's quite a lot of experience that has been gained.

[00:33:04] So, and then you've got, say, the two thousands, you gained a little bit of experience, then the twenty‑teens, you've gained more experience, and now you've got more capacity, more experience. So as you're getting more experience, you can do things more efficiently. And on top of it, you've got this advent of organisations like yourself, so I'm sure your data forecasting and prediction is infinitely better in 2025 than it was 10 years ago. It was 20 years ago when you actually had less data available. Would that be correct, or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

[00:33:37] Harsh Goenka: No, that's definitely true. So we did install the second terawatt of solar much faster than the first terawatt, right? And I have no doubts that the third terawatt of solar is going to come at the same rate, if not faster, but there might be some hiccups on the way. So, yeah, we need to learn from all the [00:34:00] experiences that we have and focus on the right manner.

[00:34:03] So I'm all positive, and I'm very hopeful that the energy transition will continue at a very rapid pace in the Asia Pacific and the rest of the world as well.

[00:34:15] Joseph Jacobelli: That's great. Harsh, thank you so much for your time. I learned quite a lot. Apologies for some of the more simplistic, naive questions given that you're an expert, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for participating in the Asia Climate Finance Podcast today.

[00:34:33] Harsh Goenka: Thank you, Joseph. It was a pleasure to speak with you as well.

[00:34:35] Narrator: Please note that the Asia Climate Finance Podcast is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Any information discussed should not be relied upon for making investment decisions. Listeners should always seek advice from a suitably qualified and authorised investment professional. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily [00:35:00] reflect the views of their current or former employers or of the podcast host or producers.