
Catalyze Impact Podcast Ep. 16 with Harsh Patel
Send us Fan MailEnergy is easy to take for granted until you’ve lived through a place where it flickers on and off. Harsh Patel joins us to explain how childhood trips to his family’s ancestral farm in India, plus the reality of rolling blackouts and brutal heat, shaped a lifelong focus on energy access, sustainability, and the idea that energy is the operating system of the economy.We dig into what Harsh actually does as a sustainability data analyst at Schneider Electric, from delivering timely, accurate energy data to helping teams decarbonize Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions across North America facilities. We talk about why energy efficiency is a daily operating practice, not a slide deck, and why metering and measurement are the foundation for any serious carbon reduction plan. If you can’t see loads in real time, you can’t manage them, and you definitely can’t decarbonize them.Then we go bigger: Electricity 4.0. Harsh breaks down the convergence of electrification, digital transformation, and AI, and what it means for buildings, factories, data centers, and resilient infrastructure. We also unpack the “circularity highway” project that earned a U.S. Department of Energy Better Buildings Better Plants award, including how standardized circular economy practices can cut waste, protect the supply chain, and save money. With copper demand rising fast and new mines taking 15 to 18 years to come online, circularity stops being a nice-to-have and starts looking like risk management.We wrap with Harsh’s board work at Equal Right, connecting climate change to climate justice and the hidden human costs behind our systems, plus one clear piece of advice for the next decade: stop treating energy and digital as two separate strategies. If this conversation sharpens how you think about the energy transition, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review so more people can find it.










