Biography
Sarthak is a Senior R&D Staff member at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he builds agentic AI systems for energy infrastructure planning, grid resilience, and federal permitting. His work helps public agencies and energy stakeholders plan, permit, and deliver infrastructure faster.
He has built AI applications for environmental review and permitting, from drafting environmental documents and identifying permitting pathways to assessing alignment with evolving regulatory requirements. His work spans permitting and power access for major infrastructure projects across data centers, geothermal, and the critical mineral sector.
He is a key contributor to PermitAI, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) initiative applying AI to energy infrastructure permitting. He leads development of NEPA-MCP, its open-source toolkit for federal environmental data, regulatory research, and geospatial screening. He also contributes to DraftNEPABench, a PNNL–OpenAI collaboration benchmarking AI coding agents for drafting environmental review documents. This broader effort is recognized in America’s AI Action Plan.
His work on grid resilience includes GridCoPilot, an LLM-based framework he developed for long-term grid planning and reliability analysis. He contributed to DOE’s Resource Adequacy Report, prepared in response to a presidential Executive Order to examine how growing electricity demand from data centers and other large loads affects U.S. grid reliability. He also develops agentic workflows for power-system simulation, transmission-interconnection studies, and control-room support.
Across these efforts, he collaborates with the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the Permitting Council, federal agencies including EPA and DOI, and industry stakeholders.
He is a core member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society Task Force on Foundation Models. Before joining PNNL, he conducted research at Georgia Tech on EV charging infrastructure, pricing markets, and consumer behavior, with work featured by AAAI, Harvard Business School, and The New York Times.