GREEN POWER: The greening of the Rs
300 crore Venkatesbwara Hatcheries
(VH) has begun. The company's first
windfarm with four 225 kw mills
started whirring in power from
September. This windfarm will provide 'the entire one mw power
required for its Tamil Nadu units,
and protect it from future power
tariff hikes. The company estimates
that though initially their power will
cost Rs 1.65 more per unit than that
supplied by the state government,
from the seventh year, when the
interest burden gets reduced and the
recurring costs remain almost constant, profits start flowing in.
FISHING MONEY: Augmentation of its
aqua-feed capacity is top-of-the
mind right now for Higasbimaru
Feeds India Ltd. On the drawing
boards is a Rs 25-crore new plant at
Gummidipoondi near Madras with a
production capacity
of 12,000 tonnes per
year. The company
has joined hands with
manufacture.
Another project in the pipeline is
a cold storage warehousing unit, also
to be located at Gummidipoondi.
The cold storage will prove a boon to
companies looking for such facilities
to store flowers, seafood and other
perishable commodities.
SENSING TROUBLE: Driving in Britain
may soon become less of a nightmare. Trafficmaster has launched a
device called Trafficmate which
warns drivers of jams using information gathered from sensors on the
motorway network. The device, to be
launched soon, uses speech tech-
nology to provide audible messages
about traffic flow and delays within
10 miles of the vehicle's position. The
company collects information from a
network of 2,400 infra-red sensors.
This is then sent to transmitter stations, where it is coded and transmitted by radio signal to a unit on the car
dashboard.
IN A NEW MOULD:
Kefa International
of Stockholm has
developed a long
lasting, environmentally friendly
technique that com-
bats moulds in the walls and ceilings
of food production and processing
industry plants. The BioRid method
is a cut above conventional surface
treatment methods because it uses a
permeable protective layer which
allows the moisture condensing in
the building material to pass
through. It also contains fewer environmentally harmful components.
An offer few would refuse.
BREEZING IN: Wind energy will be sailing in full steam in Kerala, thanks to
a new Rs one crore joint venture to
develop new plants. It is a joint project of Kerala's Penta group, the
Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) and the Agency
for Non-Conventional Energy and
Rural Technology. The objective of
the yet-to-be-named company is to
develop adequate infrastructure for
providing potential investors with
turnkey facilities. These include
choosing sites, supplying cranes
required for putting up wind towers,
improving roads, building of sub-
stations and making funds available
through agencies like IREDA.
FRESH BREATH: The Indian Petrochemicals Corporation Ltd (IPCL)
and the Indian Institute of
Technology (11T) now know how to
make the Pressure Swing Absorption
(PSA), the technology used to produce medical oxygen from air. The
PSA technology, much in demand for
treating asthmatics, is widely used in
the West, However,
importing it is
costly, since a foreign PSA medical
oxygen unit costs
anything between
Rs 1.3 lakh to Rs 1.7
lakh. The indigenous unit is likely to
be priced at around Rs 60,000 only.
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