Fascinating. $500 billion in private investments in infrastructure in India in the next 3 years.
And in China - a coal power plant goes up every two weeks.
This sort of thing creates all sorts of opportunities, all sorts of problems, and all sorts of challenges. I like what this Bangladeshi is doing about some of them.
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May 2, 2007 at 5:51 pm
ZaFa
Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) a California based non-profit organization is actively researching on carbon sequestering option to curb down the emission of CO2 in the air (from the power plants). EPRI also is looking into the prospect of using nuclear energy to produce electricity in a mass scale that essentially would reduce the number of coal fired plants within U.S. China has historically been a problem child as far as environmental restoration is concerned.
The clean water technology that Iqbal is planning to introduce in BD had already seen some success in the pilot plant scale. Another innovative technology he’s pursuing is using biogas to produce electricity. This one will also be based on small entrepreneurship model. One entrepreneur in the village will gather compost and produce the bio gas, the other entrepreneur will buy the gas to generate electricity that would come handy to purify (remove arsenic and pathogens) water as well.
May 2, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Shamshir
Thanks for the info! This is great stuff!
May 2, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Farid
How does this relate with Dr. Yunus’s contribution??
May 3, 2007 at 4:44 pm
ZaFa
I forgot to mention EPRI’s another brave venture that’s gathering a lot of attention lately is their plug-in hybrid cars.
Some of you may be aware of the hybrid cars that run partly on gas and partly on electricity. Since the electricity supply is short lived it has not taken over the market yet. What the plug-in hybrid will do is give the drivers an option to plug in their cars to recharge the energy cells, kind of like the way people fill up their tanks in gas station.
Additionally the dynamo inside the engine will be used a mini generator to produce electricity that can be stored in a capacitor cells. It seemed like a far off future, but it really is something will be able to enjoy in our life time.
EPRI estimates that by 2020 about 95% of all vehicles in USA will be some kind of hybrid. The conventional vehicles emit tons of NOx gases (along with CO2s). NOx gases are other element that factor in global temperature rise. The hybrids will be much better option than adding ethanol additives to gasoline to reduce NOx emission.
Farid, Iqbal Quadir was the person who took his idea of using cell phone as a micro credit for the rural women (the so called mobile-phone-ladies) to Dr Yunus. Iqbal also convinced TeleNor (who were suspicious about investing in such huge amount in Bangladesh) to provide the tech expertise needed. [Iqbal is however no longer in the board of GPL, he left and took an adjunct faculty position in Harvard.] Grameen Telecom (subsidiary of Grameen Bank) is in partnership with TeleNor to run GPL.