Sunil Sharan
Senior Fellow
Sunil Sharan’s work at American Progress focuses on smart grid and transmission policy making. Sharan joined CAP from GE, where he served as the director of the smart grid initiative and developed and implemented a global smart grid strategy for the company.
Prior to GE he spent eight years building clean-energy businesses for Echelon and Terranova. At Echelon, Sharan founded the smart metering business unit and grew it to a $100 million run rate by leading the development of new products, market channels, and cutting-edge value propositions and business cases. He helped create what is now the world’s most widely adopted smart metering system, with over 30 million smart meters powered by Echelon’s technology deployed worldwide.
Sharan has extensive experience in clean-energy policy making. In 2001, along with two industry colleagues, Sharan founded the trade association Demand Response and Smart Grid Coalition that has since grown to include over 40 leading providers of energy technologies and services, including Google, GE, and IBM. He concertedly lobbied federal and state energy regulators and legislators over a six-year period and finally convinced them on the benefits of the smart grid, resulting in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 recommending each state to deploy smart meters as well as the governments of California and Ontario, Canada financing $3 billion for their statewide rollout. Prior to the energy sector, Sharan worked at Dell, L’Oréal, and as an entrepreneur.
Sharan holds a master of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a master of science physics and bachelor of science in electrical engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. He has completed the Jean Monnet Program in business and economics at the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France.
