Biography: Dr. Vishal Garg is a University Chair Professor and the Director of Indorama Ventures Center for Clean Energy. He works on various aspects of energy efficiency in buildings, such as building energy simulation for designing energy-efficient buildings and automation and controls for efficient operations. His current focus is on Smart Energy Homes. He is developing and field testing a Smart Home Energy Management System (SHEMS) to understand its impact on energy savings and demand reduction. This work also includes psychological evaluations and sociological approaches to understanding people’s energy behaviour. He is also involved in policy-making and market research of smart energy homes and is incubating a start-up to facilitate lab to market.
Prof Garg is enthusiastic about cool surfaces for mitigating the impact of Urban Heat Islands, thereby reducing cooling energy consumption, offsetting global warming, and saving the lives of the urban poor, especially during heatwaves. He has impacted the deployment of over one million square feet of cool surfaces in the country and is currently supporting the development of a cool roof policy for Telangana with a target of 100 sq. km of cool roofs in Hyderabad. He is the recipient of the inaugural Dr Arthur Rosenfeld Urban Cooling Achievement Award - an award established by the Global Cool Cities Alliance to honour the legacy of Dr Rosenfeld’s advocacy for cooler buildings, cooler cities and a cooler planet.
He serves on the editorial board of well-known journals, is a member of several national and international academic committees, was the founding president and board member of the International Building Performance Simulation Association’s (IBPSA) Indian affiliate, is an executive committee member of Alliance for an Energy-Efficient Economy and is a panellist for a chapter on sustainability in the National Building Code of India. As a task force member of ISHRAE, he has contributed to the Covid-19 guidelines on air conditioning and ventilation for healthcare facilities. He is also a project committee voting member in the ASHRAE’s Standing Standard Project Committee 90.2: Energy Efficient Design of Low-Rise Residential Buildings. He is a Fellow of IBPSA-world, the Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) and the Indian Society of Lighting Engineers. Garg also has a US patent for his research on Transactive-Energy based Task Controls which he plans to productise.