Venture Center is committed to supporting and advancing clean energy technologies and doing our bit for a cleaner and better future. Over the years, we have helped many entrepreneurs and startups such as Noble Exchange and Gram oorja bring forth their clean tech solutions to the market.
In July 2017, Noble Exchange launched India’s first bus fuelled on Bio CNG (processed from city waste). The “city waste – city bus” program at Pune is the first of its kind initiative outside of Sweden to be adopted at a large-scale customer level, with huge corporates such as Tata Motors and Infosys extending their support. In addition, Noble Exchange has set up the world’s largest capacity food-waste-processing plant that is converting over 1700 tonnes of waste, generated in the city of Pune, to value! Gram Oorja, a social enterprise has also been doing commendable work towards providing renewable energy for rural communities.
In addition to assisting startups, we wanted to transform Venture Center into an eco-friendly, sustainable and green campus that can maintain itself without being a burden on the environment in terms of energy, waste, and water. In the last few months, Venture Center has undertaken various clean energy initiatives to build a clean and self sustaining campus.
Solar Farm
With generous CSR support from the International Biotech Park at Pune, a solar farm has been set up at Venture Center to reduce the incubator’s carbon footprint. The support also includes setting up a plug-and-play test rig for entrepreneurs and startups to test multiple clean/renewable power technology ideas and prototypes under real load conditions. The solar farm is being implemented by two of Venture Center’s incubatees. Gram oorja is helping with the physical implementation of the project, while Pratiti Technologies is assisting with remote data monitoring and a logging system based on IOT under the Helios IOT brand. The launch of the solar farm was accompanied by an event to showcase cutting-edge, indigenous clean energy technologies from India that are being implemented in India and abroad. These include CEERI’s solar tree technology and CSIR-NCL’s patent protected biodiesel technology that is being piloted in Japan & US.
Waste Audit
In the last few months, the four social innovation (SIIP) fellows at Venture Center carried out a waste audit to identify, quantify and analyze the composition of the waste generated within the Venture Center campus, along with providing an overview of current waste handling processes, The data was collected by mapping different sources of waste, interacting with staff and employees, and recording data by observation. Based on their observations, the fellows have put together a workplan for waste reduction, and Venture Center is delighted to implement their recommendations and enhance and strengthen existing recycling initiatives currently in place. In addition to these efforts, our employees and entrepreneurs are also conscious about saving energy and water, and we enforce very strict standards of waste disposal and management. We believe that such direct learning experiences will help our SIIP fellows solve meaningful, real world problems in their own startups.
