The Hindu : Business : WB gets CDM funding for rice husk power

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Business

Business

WB gets CDM funding for rice husk power

Indrani Dutta

A consortium of rice mills will receive Rs. 15 cr. from a Swedish co.

KOLKATA: West Bengal has become the first State to get funding under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto protocol from an overseas body.

A consortium of 33 rice mills will receive about Rs. 15 crore from a Swedish company for substituting greenhouse gas emitting fuel sources in favour of rice husk — a green power that is a waste product for these mills.

Disclosing this to The Hindu, S. P. Gonchowdhury, director of the West Bengal Renewable Energy Development Agency (WBREDA), the State's nodal agency for renewable energy promotion, said the agreement for funding against carbon trading was signed on May 5.

The WBREDA had partnered the rice-millers body `Green Power Consortium,' which had forayed into this area in 2002. Now there were 61 such rice mills, which had stopped using the highly-polluting diesel generating sets to set up gasifiers to generate a total of 30 MW at a cost of Rs. 20 crore. These mills were concentrated in the State's rice bowl — Burdwan and Hooghly — but were also located in Birbhum and West Midnapore, Mr. Gonchowdhury said.

Rice husk has begun emerging as a feasible energy option not only for these mills for whom voltage fluctuations in the conventional thermal power mode is annoying, but also for corporates in the State. West Bengal, being the country's largest rice producer, generates a sizable quantum of rice husk and companies are now queueing up to buy these from the smaller mills and use it to produce power. Amrit Bio Energy and Industries, which has a ferro alloy unit here, is one such company. Among the bigger ones, Hindustan Motors had shown interest in a rice husk based power project.

While management consultants Ernst & Young had helped in getting the certified emission reduction (CER) registration, the WBREDA had catalysed both the concept and the project progress thereafter.

Besides using it as a captive source, the mills as also corporates could `wheel' in the green power through the State Electricity Board under the Electricity Act 2003.

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