What is CleanTech?

Before we start discussing CleanTech in India, lets first understand this very basic question - What is CleanTech? In my view, the quest to understand CleanTech will unravel various opportunities in this sector. In the basics lie the opportunities. Therfore, lets first try to define CleanTech.

Cleantech in my view straddles three broad areas - Energy, Water and Food. These are very basic needs of of any human society and different societies are on different ladders wrt the development and consumption in these areas. The developed world had started their greed of more energy, more water and more food way back in early part of last century. In their hunger of these basic needs, they unfortunately created associated devils - Green house gases, polluted and depleted water resources and chemical pesticides/fertilizers which did give them more resources but also gave them more diseases. All these externalities were never accounted for while they were relishing the benefits.

India and China are where the developed world were a century back. They are claiming their right to satisfy their greed. But can this earth afford to feed these two giant babies?

For developed world, CleanTech largely means bringing back the environment to the pollution levels of pre-industrial revolution period. For them it is largely "replacing" their consumption with cleaner alternatives. For example, for them the bigger questions are can we replace our coal plants with clean-coal technologies like coal gasification.

For India and China, CleanTech largely means how can we minimize the damage to the environment while not compromising on growth. For us, it is largely "addition" to our consumption by the alternatives resources which are cleaner. For example, for us the bigger question is that whether we should go with Coal or renewables. If India and China choose to go on renewable rampage, we can just overwhelm the whole renewable market.

For example, China added 90 GW of installed capacity to their grid in 2007 alone. This is around 1/11th of US installed capacity and 70% of India's installed capacity. If China chooses to go on renewable route instead of Coal, they can just dominate the whole renewable market in the world. They have a choice which unfortunately the developed world did not.

India per capita consumption of electrcity is 1/20th of US per capita and 1/4th of World average (Indians consume around 600 units/year). This means that if we started consuming electricity like Americans we will need to improve our power infrastrcuture by 25 times of what we have. Similarly, like China, we have a choice to go for renewables.

Hence, for developing countries like India "CleanTech" means increase in the availability of energy, food and water with no additional impact on environment. For developed world, it means decrease in the green house gases, effluents and chemical fertilizers with no adverse impact on availability of the resources.

The developed world need to internalize their externalities of the past (cleanup the past). We need to make sure we minimize the externalities themselves in the future as we grow (make sure no cleanup required in future). I think this difference is very important as we try to understand the opportunities in CleanTech. The opportunities which developed countries are trying to go after in CleanTech may not necessarily translate directly into the opportunities we may have in India. It is very important for us to understand local needs of India and then try to derive opportunities from them. Localization of opportunities will be very important going forward.

I hope this helped the people in underastanding CleanTech at a very basic level.

-Manoj