Subject: PM Modi - Stanford event on clean energy
From: "Biswal, Nisha" <[email-masked]>
To: "[email-masked]'" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 17:03:29 +0000

Hi John:

It was good to see you in Aspen.  I wanted to follow up with you on the Modi visit to California.  As I mentioned, there is a lot of interest in the GoI to focus on two themes for the Silicon Valley visit.  1) is digital economy - here the focus will be a visit to google and some announcements on Google's massive investments in India.  The other focus is on clean energy.  Here the Indians want to visit Tesla and hopefully announce a Tesla partnership/venture with India focusing on their battery storage system for solar.   The other major effort is around a clean energy roundtable with Stanford that Commerce had been working on.  It now it seems Pritzker cannot make it to California and the Indians are looking for some other USG principal to participate with industry, academia and government.  Before I engage the WH and State or DoE, I wanted to see if you had thoughts on how we should approach this.  The Indians have said that it would need to be a Cabinet rank principal to convene this with the PM.

We will of course see if Secretary Kerry or Secretary Moniz can go to Califorinia that weekend but things are complicated by the Xi visit and the UNGA schedule.  Are there other options you would suggest we pursue?  Another option would be to see if Governor Brown or perhaps President Clinton would be interested in co-hosting/convening.  Also, would you want to participate in the roundtable?  Let me know if you have thoughts on this or want to discuss.

Warm regards

Nisha

Nisha Desai Biswal
Assistant Secretary of State
Bureau for South and Central Asian Affairs
U.S. Department of State
Tel: (202)736-4325
Fax: (202) 736-4333