A business plan in clean technology

Abstract

The Opportunity: With climate change awareness and activism becoming very prominent in the last 3 years, “Green energy” has become a buzzword. Apart from financial incentives like carbon credits, subsidies and accelerated depreciation for entities that go green, there is also a societal pressure on big IT and manufacturing companies to employ green technologies at their campuses. “Green factory”, “Green buildings” and “Green apartments” are becoming common, and there is also a pull from end consumers for green certification for buildings. One major aspect of going green is to recycle and use whatever is naturally available at a place. Given the concept of biogas is entirely based on recycling natural produce, it becomes very relevant in the above mentioned market conditions. The Idea and the Business: The basic idea behind the proposed business is to locate biogas plants where input for the plant would be generated in the normal course of functioning with no additional effort. Thus, urban agglomerations or living clusters of human beings were identified as the target locations for the biogas plants, as the inputs for the plant could be food waste and human excreta. Based on this, it was decided to target IT parks, large apartment complexes, and hotels. Going green would help IT parks in getting LEED certifications; apartment complexes could charge a premium because of the ‘green’ label, and also use the by-product of biomanure for their gardens; and hotels would find it easier to brand themselves as ecotels. Apartments cannot be converted after they are built, unlike the other two, and hence, in the case of apartments alone the plant has to be built along with the initial construction. This is to enable mechanisms for waste segregation at source. The Company’s Offerings: The services offered by the company are two-fold: 1) Construction of 1-ton, KVIC model biogas plants as sub-contractor for the target market. 2) Maintenance of biogas plants for consumers under an annual maintenance contract Currently, the company would function only in the domain of gas, as production of power from biogas does not make much economical sense as yet. In future, once the technology becomes mature enough to address this concern, we would enter into power generation from biogas as well.