Green India Building Systems and Services (GIBSS), which is a Mumbai-based cleantech Startup started by Arun Shenoy and Mandar Kaprekar has a vision of building zero net energy buildings and a mission of making technologies which are environmentally sustainable, commercially viable.
Most of the businesses are reluctant to use energy efficiency projects for their buildings. The main reason for which is limited capital budget. Sometimes, businesses are blind folded to the long term positive impact on the wealth of the company if they adopt clean technologies. Understanding this, the company came up with a model ‘ZERO Initial Investment Model’. According to this model, client pays the project cost from the operating budget rather than capital budget. GIBSS uses the income from the cost savings to pay the costs of the project, including the costs of the investment.
India, which is one of the largest economies in the world, is heading towards a ‘city-explosion’. With growing urban middle class and working population, the energy requirements are bound to rise. The conventional sources of energy like thermal energy is not going to fulfill the demand of the already power deprived cities. After Industries and Agriculture, it is the buildings that consume the maximum amount of energy. Until and unless energy efficient buildings are designed, it would be a massive task to tackle the the shortage of electricity in the country.
GIBSS use technologies like Hot Water System which replaces Boilers to reduce your Hot Water operating costs by 60-80%, LED LIGHTING which replaces conventional Halogen, Fluorescent and Incandescent lamps to reduce lighting operating costs between 60-90% and geothermal system which reduces air conditioning electricity bills by 40-60%.
Geothermal heat sink system uses the earth as heat sink instead of outside atmosphere in conventional systems. The earth temperatures in most cases are much lower than the atmospheric temperatures. With the lower temperatures the efficiencies of the air-conditioning systems are significantly higher. The Hot Water co-generation system operates at efficiency 7-8 times higher than conventional boiler/ geyser system. The system uses building heat that is otherwise lost to the atmosphere, to generate hot water.
For Venture Capitalists too, investing in cleantech startups is becoming a norm. One of the VC funds, Ventureeast Tenet fund has already invested in excess of $30M in cleantech Startups in India. In september 2015, GIBBS participated in an event in the Silicon Valley to showcase their ideas and prototypes. They showcased their Geothermal innovation that can reduce National Electricity demand by up to 30%, National Industrial Water demand by up to 60% and GHG emissions by 20 million tonnes
As far as the role of government in the promotion of energy efficient buildings is concerned, one of the solutions lies in the giving tax concessions to the companies which design energy efficient buildings.
Team TOS
