Youth Entrepreneurial Green Awards HUGE Success!

Written by Caroline / 15 August 2009 / Read Caroline's latest blog entries.

In partnership with IYCN and Exhibitions India, the Climate Solutions team organized a youth awards program which drew out applications from almost 50 innovative youth-led projects across the country that had implemented successful projects in renewable energy, energy efficiency or community development projects. Hosted at the Renewable Energy Expo, the finalists were primarily renewable energy and energy efficiency innovators, whose systems drew awe and excitement from all participants and many venture capitalists. I'll be giving more profiles of the projects over the coming week, but here's an overview of the teams!

Delhi College of Engineering and NSIT Solar Car teams both competed in the solar car challenge in South Africa last year and won 3 and 4th place respectively, but one won for cost-competitiveness and the other for safety. Both were among the least expensive made (about $7,000 USD) and are less expensive than the commercially available Revas we solarized and drove across the country! DCE students are now designing a solar system to charge the electric vehicles on campus so that not only will petrol be banned, but the electric Revas will be generating solar power.

Saurabh, Rudren, Nitesh, and Ranitaj from Aharva University in Mumbai made wind turbines on their campuse out of PVC pipes for under $400, and generated 500 W of electricity. It's powering their MechE lab now! A team from Nagpur had developed innovative pongamia oil processing systems, and other students had developed solar cells more efficient than the professionals on display at the RE Expo!

Others had designed mechanisms to capture waste energy from the movement of trains to power train lighting systems. IIT Delhi students have developed a system to pressurize methane coming out of biogas systems to eliminate CO2 in the gas and put the methane into canisters as CNG (which now powers cars on campus).

Some of our other entrepreneurial ventures were as exciting but didn't make the shortlist to the RE epxo, but we'll be highlighting them in other ways this year! See below for a few other examples, and be sure to sign up for our RSS feed for more stories over the coming weeks!

Clinton Vaz has been running for the past 4-5 years a campaign to better manage waste in Goa, which is now one of the most successful waste management systems in India! He's now starting a program to save Goa's frogs by cleaning up the waterways from sewage. Abhishek Humbad and his start up NextGen PMS is doing carbon footprinting and carbon offsetting (thru rural biogas) for major companies, India's biggest cricketers, Members of Parliament, and universities -- and he's 21! He's now working with the government of Portugal to work on renewable energy partnerships with Portuguese government too.

You'll find more profiles over the coming week on the website, so keep yourself posted!