Gireesh Chandra Prasad & Soma Banerjee, New Delhi
The Economic Times
Fancy owning cars painted with particles that will cool your vehicle drawing solar power and still not leave a trace of carbon in the air? Or buildings that remain cool while consuming far less energy than they do now?
These and several other sustainable energy solutions for a wide variety of everyday needs could become a reality with India and the US deciding to bring together scientists in both the countries with support from corporate groups.
The Ministry of Science and Technology is all set to launch ‘BIJLEE’ or the Berkeley-India Joint Leadership on Energy and the Environment, under which the US government will spare its top scientists and engineers to develop sustainable energy solutions for India, said an Indian government official, who declined to be identified.
Institutions supporting the initiative include the University of California, Berkeley, the Indian Institute of Science and various Indian Institutes of Technology. The Indian government’s research body, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), played a key role in envisaging the project.
All this was also confirmed by Purnendu Chatterjee, chairman of investment company The Chatterjee Group, which is a major corporate supporter of the initiative. US-based Chatterjee is an alumnus of the University of California, Berkeley, and his group is most known in India for its investment in Haldia Petrochemicals.
He is not alone in the BIJLEE initiative. Indian groups such as ITC, Tata Power, Reliance Energy, Infosys and some California-based utilities are also supporting this project, which needs strong participation from industry to help design technologies that are commercially viable.
BIJLEE will attempt to find sophisticated ways to lower energy consumption across a range of industrial processes and could potentially benefit everything under the sun from building houses and cars to consumer electronics, lighting systems and water purifiers.
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