Keynotes &
Public Discourse

Shaurya Ritwik joined Philippines Clean Energy Week (PCEW) on 9 October 2026 at Sheraton Manila Bay as a guest speaker and participant in the Leadership Roundtable on Industrial Decarbonisation, Corporate Sustainability and Net-Zero Leadership. The event was organised by Firstview and Solar Quarter.

Ritwik has consistently approached decarbonisation as a discipline of capital allocation, risk management and governance. A roadmap establishes intent; capital assigns it a price; and disclosure, under board oversight, makes it accountable. When any of these elements is missing, ambition risks drifting into rhetoric.

In his experience, transition plans seldom falter because of engineering alone. They falter when a technically sound proposal reaches a credit committee unequipped to assess it, or a board unprepared to scrutinise it.

The terms of energy security have changed. The strategic reserve of the twentieth century was oil. The strategic flexibility of this one is energy storage.

Keynote: Financing Energy Sovereignty: Why Energy Storage Is Becoming a Strategic Asset in an Age of Geopolitical Volatility

Shaurya Ritwik opened with an observation drawn from direct experience. During the escalation in West Asia, he spent several days with executives at two major oil and gas companies as they worked through insurance premiums, re-routing and tanker availability. Their crisis planning was rigorous. The problem lay upstream of it. Every scenario, however well optimised, still terminated in a physical delivery they did not control. For an importing economy, that is the trap.

The keynote argued that the binding constraint on storage deployment across emerging markets is not capital availability but bankability, and that closing the gap requires ordering the capital stack by function rather than by preference.

Convening manufacturers, financiers, policymakers and international delegations at the centre of the world’s largest battery manufacturing base, the Expo opened with a direct argument about where industrial capacity meets institutional capital.

Opening Address: Building Bridges, Not Silos

Speaking days after the BRICS 2026 Summit in New Delhi, Shaurya Ritwik framed the moment against the call from leadership across the Global South for developing economies to become co-architects of progress rather than its consumers. In clean energy, he argued, that ambition depends on building bridges rather than silos.

The address positioned energy storage as the true next frontier of the transition, making the case that clean generation alone cannot secure resilience without the capacity to store and dispatch it.

The Summit brought together policymakers, senior government officials, industry executives, manufacturers, financiers, researchers, and multilateral representatives from across the ASEAN region and beyond.

Opening Address: A World That Can No Longer Afford to Wait

Shaurya Ritwik delivered the Inaugural Opening Remarks at ASEE 2026, an invitation that reflected both the Solar Futures Alliance's standing in the region and its institutional commitment to elevating the policy and finance conversation around solar deployment across the Global South.

Opening before the assembled delegates, Ritwik drew attention not to the technical achievements of the solar industry, but to the geopolitical and humanitarian lessons of the West Asia crisis, which had exposed the structural fragility of energy systems built on fossil fuel dependency. He argued that for nations across the Global South, the lesson was unambiguous: energy sovereignty is not a strategic preference, it is an existential necessity.

A high-level convening held at the Asian Institute of Management, bringing together governments, multilateral institutions, development finance actors, civil society, and private sector leaders to advance a coordinated, market-based approach to climate adaptation and mitigation across the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Structured around six climate action axes spanning energy and supply chains, nature and biodiversity, agriculture and food systems, urban resilience, human development, and market enablers, the Dialogue was convened to move beyond declarations and into actionable architecture: structured financing, carbon market interoperability, cross-country governance alignment, and investment-ready solutions for 2026 and 2027.

Shaurya joined the Asian Institute of Management as an expert panelist for a thought-provoking Development Industry Dialogue on the future of sustainable finance across Asia-Pacific, a session bringing together practitioners, academics, and policymakers to examine how innovation is reshaping the structural mechanics of how capital is mobilised, priced, and deployed across the region.

The dialogue focused on the critical challenge of strategically aligning capital with institutional mandates to finance a just, inclusive, and climate-resilient future. Shaurya emphasised that this demands new frameworks for risk, impact measurement, and cross-sector collaboration that go beyond conventional ESG compliance and into genuine structural redesign.