Haryana adopts cluster approach for energy conservation

The Department of Renewable Energy, Haryana, has launched a scheme to incentivise energy audit in the industrial sector. The department has been made the state designated agency (SDA) under the Energy Conservation Action Plan.

Renewable Energy Department and Haryana Renewable Energy Development Agency (HAREDA) Director Sumita Misra said that industrial enterprises would be provided with financial assistance to assess the potential of energy conservation by carrying out walk-through energy audit at their facilities. The audit would be done by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, certified energy auditors and consultants.

Under the scheme, all categories of units — small, medium and large-scale — will be eligible for financial incentives to the tune of Rs 7,500, Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000 (respectively), for the walk-through energy audit.

The energy auditor will assess the potential for conservation and compute the expenditure incurred on energy conservation measures. “In the current financial year, our focus will be on the SME clusters in Gurgaon, Faridabad, Karnal and Yamunanagar”, Misra said.

Only those units will get financial assistance which are located in Haryana. They should also have paid electricity bills regularly and not availed of any financial assistance from any government organisation for carrying out the energy audit in the past three years.

Misra said that industrial units would be registered on a first-come-first-serve basis. The department will give financial incentive of up to Rs 21 lakh for the first 160 units under the scheme in 2010-11. Sixty units in Faridabad and Gurgaon districts have already been approved for conducting walk-through energy audits.

After the walk-through energy audit, some units will be selected for detailed energy audit. On the recommendation of the detailed audit report, some of these would be selected for demonstration projects on a 25:75 cost-sharing basis.

Energy conservation is the cheapest, easiest and cleanest way of bridging the gap between demand and supply. “The cost of power generation by conventional means is Rs 4 per unit but the cost of saving power by energy conservation means is only Rs 1 per unit. The state has a 12.6 per cent power deficit and there is a potential of saving 3.2 billion units of electricity annually in agricultural, commercial, municipal, industrial and domestic sectors”, Mishra added.