MONEYMAKERS
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.