With focus on energy efficiency and reducing power cost for industries, United Nations Industrial Development Organisation and Global Environment Facility (GEF) will implement a project for foundries in Coimbatore to improve their energy efficiency. It will be executed by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE).
As many as 30 to 50 foundries here are expected to be part of it and the project is likely to take off in a month. Officials of BEE and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) told The Hindu here on Thursday that the GEF was already implementing a project in five industrial clusters in the country, jointly with the World Bank. This included the lime kiln units at Tirunelvelli and foundries at Kolhapur. The World Bank-GEF project took off in 2010 in the five clusters and will end this year. About 600 units have benefited directly. Energy audit was done for about 1,000 micro, small and medium-scale enterprises and 600 were short-listed. Investment grade detailed project report was prepared for these. Nearly 400 units are now in different stages of implementing the energy efficiency technologies.
Prosanto Pal of TERI said that awareness was created on best practices and best technologies. The technologies were those that are commercially available and the units were not adopting either because of lack of awareness or because of the finance needed. The Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) was also involved in the World Bank-GEF project and it has provided capital subsidy to some units that have come forward to invest in energy-efficiency technology.
The foundries in the cluster have a data of technology providers, service providers, best practices, etc.
Based on the experience of this programme at Kolhapur, a two-day training programme is on at Coimbatore for the foundries. The UNIDO-GEF project planned for the foundries here will be on the same lines of the Kolhapur one.
