Sam Yamdagni grew up in Thailand, studied engineering at IIT, and spent his early career watching energy get consumed at a scale most people never see — pump houses drawing a gigawatt of power, one pump at a time. That experience flipped something in him. Not a climate awakening. A business one.
He started PSS Powers with his own money, built his first solar plants in Thailand, and was just starting to feel comfortable — good returns, organic growth, thinking about slowing down — when his uncle flew in from Stockholm to see what he’d built.
Standing in front of the panels, his uncle looked at him and said: “Sam, you can’t be satisfied with this.”
What followed was a phone call, two Indian cities, a glass of wine, and a target that sounded completely fake: 3.2 gigawatts. Today, with $300 million committed through a JV with I Squared Capital, 200MW delivered in the last 18 months, and teams of 50 in Thailand and 35 in India — it doesn’t sound fake anymore.
In this conversation, Sam opens up about the decade of building before anyone was watching, why he’s not a climate guy and why that actually makes him more credible, and what it costs personally to go from “this is quite nice” to “we need to solve a national-scale problem.”
We also get into the real story of India — why it’s the most compelling renewable energy market in Asia right now and also the most complex, the nuances of executing across states with different policies and grid operators carrying a billion dollars in debt, and why batteries are the next massive wave coming.
And Sam makes a point that cuts through the noise: the energy transition isn’t just about what gets generated. The cheapest decarbonisation in Asia isn’t a new solar plant — it’s the electricity you’re already wasting.