Sunena Gupta

Utility vegetation management has run for decades on a slow detect-and-react cycle: calendar-based trim schedules, visual foot patrols, and expensive, weather-dependent light detection and ranging (LiDAR) flights. That model assumes trees grow and die at predictable rates. Extreme and erratic weather is breaking that assumption, and it is the main reason utilities are moving from periodic inspection toward continuous monitoring based on artificial intelligence (AI).

Sunena is an Associate, Resources & Environmental Management at Cleantech Group and is based in the U.S.  She is focused on emerging innovation and trends across all cleantech sectors. ​ Prior to joining Cleantech Group, Sunena’s roles involved working on renewable energy projects and economic research. Sunena earned her Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and her Bachelor’s in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley.

At Cleantech Group, we track hundreds of adaptation and resilience innovators across wildfire, flood, extreme heat, and earth observation, and score them against the same criteria: how novel the underlying technology is, how competitive the costs are, and how much real-world impact and potential to scale it delivers. A pattern has become hard to ignore in that work. The companies pulling ahead on adoption aren’t always the ones with the most advanced sensing.