Thursday, February 13, 2014: In a new development to escalate cooperation on renewable energy, India and Netherlands have signed a Memorandum of Understanding. This concordance between the two countries will help set up and exchange the technical and institutional knowledge on clean energy, which will be facilitated by the Indo-Dutch Joint Working Group.
The MoU was signed between the secretary, ministry of new and renewable rnergy, Dr Satish Balram Agnihotri and the Dutch ambassador, Alphonsus Stoelinga in presence of Dr Farooq Abdullah, minister of new and renewable energy in India. The cooperation will particularly aim to resource wind and solar energy, biomass and smart grids.
While addressing the press, Stoelinga said, “Both India and the Netherlands have ambitious sustainable energy targets and face similar challenges in realising clean energy options in densely populated areas. The MoU will encourage cooperation, as well as between research institutions and private companies in both countries.”
Netherlands is a leading state in offshore wind energy, co-combustion of biomass in coal-fired power plants, methods to pre-treat biomass and smart grids. With this new understanding with India, the Dutch are likely to bank upon the Indian expertise to excel in applying these high-tech solutions in best possible cost-effective mode.
To showcase the potential of the Indo-Dutch cooperation in this field, many companies that are implementing the Dutch clean energy technologies like DSM, PwC and Thermax India were also present at the signing ceremony. Thermax is building 1 MW biomass gasification plant for Ruchi Soya Industries Limited. This plant uses technology acquired from the Dutch Energy Research Centre and the Dutch firm Dahlman, and will be open by March, this year. DSM is setting up a Demo 1MW solar power plant at its engineering plastics manufacturing unit, which also uses the above Dutch inputs. This plant is aimed at compensating up to 25 per cent of the total electricity requirement via solar energy and reducing the CO2 footprint of DSM.
Netherlands is one of the many nations that intent to achieve a sustainable, reliable and affordable energy system by the year 2050. The country aims to reduce CO2 emissions by half, and to also generate nearly 40 per cent of electricity from sources like wind at sea and biomass.
