Building a long-lasting relationship between Europe and India with green energy

The Indian partnership is a collaboration with huge potential and has contributed to the E-LAND project with opportunities for data simulations for understanding the technology impact to store energy.

As part of E-LAND’s commitment to innovative energy solutions, the project has built partnerships with many stakeholders. One of them is BSES, which is the pilot partner in India.

With this partnership, the hope is to establish a long-lasting relationship and share knowledge about green energy solutions. One of the events reflecting the European-Indian partnership took place in March of 2020, during India Smart Utility Week, where we promoted the E-LAND project and visited places in and out of New Delhi.

Thomas Mikkelsen, CEO & Founder of GECO Global

Thomas Mikkelsen, the CEO, and founder of GECO Global represented the E-LAND project at India Smart Utility Week earlier this year:

’’We are in India because there are identifiable elements relevant to develop the solutions to enable the green energy transition and us together we have the know-how and we have the technologies to do it and this partnership is about learning from each other and sharing knowledge and experience’’.

The Garbage Mountain

During a school visit, we found out that India takes a profoundly different approach to education and teaching. As part of their school curriculum among other things, they also teach classes about ethics and how to live a more sustainable life. Despite this, one thing that became obvious while traveling around New Delhi was that India may have a garbage mountain growing problem. India has been reported to be one of the ten places in the world with giant trash problems. On the outskirts of Delhi, literally mountains of rubbish pile up as most garbage becomes landfill waste.

Mountain of Garbage in the outskirts of Delhi (Photo: GECO Global)

This presents an opportunity to recycle and to use household waste as fuel for green power production. But it also demands insight into the whole value chain from how to make people do the necessary segregation into fractions, to handling and burning the waste without smoke pollution. One of those instances which recently covered Delhi in a huge duvet of haze happened to be farmers clearing out their crop fields, as they have no other viable alternative.

Garbage as part of the solution

In Europe, most of the garbage is part of the solution. In Copenhagen, for example, as their goal to become one of the first carbon-neutral capitals in the world, they have built a futuristic ski slope to use the waste for creating electricity. Copen-Hill, pictured below, is a power-plant with a double purpose; skiing and also turning waste into energy.

CopenHill (Photo: visitcopenhagen.com)

Finding out news ways of introducing clean energy in places like New Delhi is hard, but not impossible. Office buildings where people live, replacing the installation, and using the garbage as fuel to create electricity are some of the ideas that we share together.