World is Green

Over the past year or so I have been covering the green industry to understand it better. Over the course, it became apparent that the biggest stories are about the people behind these initiatives.

In the course of being in this industry and writing on the blog I have come across some interesting people who are trying to make it big in this industry in their own way. In order to tell their story, I have decided to conduct an interview with them. The idea is to understand the stories at a more personal and knowledgable level.

I have no specific publishing schedule, but would try to do about 3 interviews a month.

Our guest today is Sreenivas Ghatty. Sreenivas is the founder and CEO of Tree Oils India. With all the interest in Biofuels Sreenivas believes that there is a great future for using them as an alternate fuel of choice.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity. I have a Masters in Agriculture and was a corporate banker in India and Dubai for 18 years until I entered the Biodiesel industry in 2003. I live in Melbourne with my wife and two daughters and keep travelling to India and other countries regularly.What is your company about?

Tree Oils India Limited was established in 2003 to produce Biodiesel from non-edible oils. Please visit our web site (www.treeoilsindia.com) to learn more about this company. Bear with me if some of the information is obsolete as the contents have not been updated during the last five years. As non-edible feedstocks were not available in sufficient quantities and at reasonable pricen at the time, we started with plantation activity. As there were no tested varities of these tree species and knowledge of agronomy was limited, we started an R&D farm to begin with. So, as of now, we are a technical-know-how company, trying to develop non-edible oil-bearing trees such as Pongamia, Jatropha etc.

Only Peter Drucker can provide this level of clarity.

Three roles of Management

Drucker teaches us three roles of management. The first role is to accomplish the function that is specific to each organization; in other words, to contribute to society through its business. If it is a newspaper company, it is to publish the best paper. If it is a greengrocery store, it is to supply the best vegetables. It is only a monastery deep in the mountains that does not have to contribute to society directly. It is only a gangster connection that does not have any intention to contribute to society. All other organizations must contribute to society, because they are allowed to exist, occupy, and hire the most valuable in society.

The second role is to make work productive and people achieving. Man as a social existence seeks to exert his ability fully, to fulfill his potential, and contribute to society. Especially from now on, we will enter an age when people will leave an organization that cannot make work productive, and satisfy them in achieving through their strengths.

The third role is not to give any negative impact on society, and to contribute society in solving its problems. This is so-called the social responsibilities of the organization.

The social responsibility of organization

The first social responsibility of organizations is to eliminate any negative impact to society caused by its existence and activities, or at least to minimize it. If a noise is produced during the process of production, it has to be reduced as much as possible. Traffic stagnation might be caused in neighborhood. It has to be eliminated. Drucker says the organization has to eliminate or at least to reduce these nuisances as much as possible.

Furthermore, the responsibility of organizations is to solve social problems by mobilizing its strengths. And, to make the problem- solving into a business if possible. In any industries such as power companies, automobile companies, convenience stores, hospitals, etc., the business itself started fulfilling social needs. It is true to any business. These two responsibilities make up the social responsibility of organizations.

Drucker affirms strongly that there are not any special responsibilities, called the social responsibility of business. It is politically wrong to give any special responsibility to anyone, or to any organization. In Europe, such an idea was discarded a long time ago, even before modern industry was born. Pascal, well known by his “Penses” (1670), pointed this out. If special responsibilities were laid on, special powers would be given. As powers are accompanied by responsibilities, responsibilities are accompanied by powers.

For management, profit is a requirement to achieve these three roles. At the same time, it is a scale to measure its achievement. It is not a purpose. A requirement is harder than a purpose. A scale is also harder than a purpose. During my thirty years in Keidanren, so called the headquarters of the Japanese business, I have never met a single CEO who said he worked for purpose of moneymaking. Drucker says there is no such thing as profit motivation. Profit is a cost that a company as a public institution needs to achieve its roles. It is a requirement. It is a standard to judge its achievement.

Source: 1366 Tech

Eco wordly on the largest solar plants (planned and operational) in the world. Australia has one coming up in Mildura, Victoria.

By 2011, Deming, New Mexico, USA will be the home of the world’s largest solar power plant. This 300 Megawatt solar facility will be 15 times the size of the current largest solar plant on the planet. New Solar Ventures and Solar Torx are the companies behind the project. The solar energy plant will cover as many as 1,300 hectares and employ between 300 and 400 people. The project’s planners estimate that the plant will supply enough energy to power 240,000 homes. (Photo: Flickr. Source: Reuters.)

The Solana solar plant, 70 miles from Pheonix, near Gila Bend, Arizona, USA, will compliment the Deming plant when both begin operations in 2011. It will produce 280 megawatts of energy, provide 1,500 jobs, and cover an area of 769 hectares. The solar power facility will be the child of Abengoa Solar and Arizona Public Service Company. However, the project depends on the United States Congress to renew clean energy tax credits, which would otherwise expire at the end of 2008. (Photo: APS. Source: Newlaunches via EcoFuss.)

Australia may briefly capture the prize for biggest solar with a plant near Mildura, Victoria, Australia. It will go into operation in 2010 and continue to grow in size until its completion in 2013. A project of TRUenergy and Solar Systems, the plant will generate 154 Megawatts of solar energy. With the Mildura plant complete, Solar Systems will continue to expand in Australia with the goal of 270,000 megawatts of output from a number of plants. Australia’s renewable energy goal is 20% by 2020. (Photo: Wikimedia. Source: Herald Tribune.)

Source: The Economist

With major corporations working on their Sustainability strategies, the top universities are not behind. Harvard has a dedicated program working for the last 7+ years where they have created one of the best university managed environmetal programs.

Stanford has now entered this in a big way. With their original program starting in 2001, they have recently launched the “Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building on March 4″. The new building is called Y2E2 and it “is projected to use roughly half the energy and 90 percent less potable water for fixtures than a typical building of its size.” The buildings uses “an array of sustainable features that fall under five categories: load reduction, passive systems, active systems, energy recovery and on-site generation. These five approaches are expected to slash the building’s power consumption by more than half.”

Interestingly, this initiative is part of ‘The Stanford Challenge” which is a 5 year $4.3 billion fund raising campaign to work on this century’s most pressing global challenges. The idea is to create a mulit-disciplinary environment for the academics to work together to create solutions to this complex issue. They have already raised $3.4 billion towards this.

John O’Brien, a friend of mine and the Managing Director of Australian Cleantech launched the Australian Clean Tech Index. This is the first time anybody has grouped together all the sectors which comprise clean technology and environmental services in Australia.  

Mr John O’Brien, Managing Director of Australian CleanTech, said concerns about climate change and energy consumption have led to greater interest in the cleantech industry and an increase in the economic value of clean technologies.

“For the first time we will be able to provide a picture of the Australian cleantech industry’s growth in a single measure,” Mr O’Brien said.“In 2007 a trialled ACT Australian Cleantech Index outperformed both the ASX 200 as well as the ASX Small Ords,” he said.

“The growth of the renewable energy sector in Australia will be driven by the Federal Government’s commitment to achieve 20 per cent of energy generation from renewable sources by 2020.”

The ACT Australian Cleantech Index includes over 75 companies, large and small, from Sims Metal Group with a market capitalisation of over $3 billion to Skydome Holdings with a market capitalisation of $5 million – plus a few outstanding performers with CBD Energy posting a 147 per cent increase in returns over a six-month period to December 2007.

I am planning a new series of interviews with people working in the Green sector. In the coming weeks, John O’Brien will be interviewed.

Nytimes writes about a new book called “Nudge” which uses behavioural science in understanding many decisions made by humans. Some experiments show that price feedbacks work. This takes it further.

“Getting the prices right will not create the right behavior if people do not associate their behavior with the relevant costs,” says Dr. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics. “When I turn the thermostat down on my A-C, I only vaguely know how much that costs me. If the thermostat were programmed to tell you immediately how much you are spending, the effect would be much more powerful.”

It would be still more powerful, he and Mr. Sunstein suggest, if you knew how your energy consumption compared with the social norm. A study in California showed that when the monthly electric bill listed the average consumption in the neighborhood, the people in above-average households significantly decreased their consumption.

The BBC reports on a new report from Greenpeace on the challenge faced by India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

It estimates that 75 million people from Bangladesh will lose their homes.It predicts that about 45 million people in India will also become “climate migrants”.

[...]

“Most of these people will be forced to leave their homes because of the sea-level rise and drought associated with shrinking water supplies and monsoon variability. The bulk of them will come from Bangladesh as most of the parts of that country will be inundated,” Dr Sudhir Chella Rajan, a climate expert and author of the study, told the BBC.

[...]

Several large cities within the low elevation coastal zone like Bombay (Mumbai) and Madras will go under the sea if the present growth rate of greenhouse emissions continue.

Greenpeace could well be right in the estimate. The solution for this is however, what Schelling proposes. He says, “The sooner Malaysia can become like Singapore, the sooner it can worry less about the impact of climate change on health, comfort, and productivity.”

In this sense, the sooner Bangladesh can grow economically, build better infrastructure and create new cities inland to support this migration the lower the impact will be. This is the same for India and Pakistan too.

A fascinating story is developing in South Australia’s energy demands.

This is where BHP steps in. The world’s biggest miner owns Olympic dam in South Australia. This mine is one of the largest mines in the world filled with copper, gold and uranium.The mine is supposed to drive the state’s economy in the coming decades. With estimates of $1 trillion, the mine can drive the growth of SA’s economy, jobs and population. In fact, Roxby Downs, a town near Olympic Dam was created to support this and has seen one of the biggest property boom in recent times.

One of the biggest needs is the demand for energy for the mine to operate. But the recent news is that there is a much greater need for this energy, upto 690 MW per year within 10 years to expand the mine. This incidentally is half of the energy requirement of the entire city of Adelaide!

This brings to question the source of power. The Greens in SA believe that the state can become a “greenhouse pariah” due to Olympic dam.

As we have seen before, Geothermal energy has an interesting future. We know that the hot rocks can generate energy with the promise of no fuel, no emissions, no waste.

I recently attended the Clean Tech session of the 12 part Climate Change 2030 seminars at Adelaide University. One of the discussions was on the Geothermal projects in South Australia. It was claimed that Adelaide is the center of the world in terms of Geothermal projects and technologies.

The speaker, Prof. Richard Hillis, who is a director at Petratherm talked about the entire issue as an optimization problem. The parameters for success for different companies were hot rocks, nearer to the grid, depth of drilling, or near to a major consumer. Each company is working on a different paradigm.

But, there is a great new opportunity for Geothermal producers to supply the “no emission” energy to this large consumer. The race is on.