After reaching out to the wider Berkeley community, we got in touch with an energy policy analyst at the UC Berkeley labor center and Don Vial center who was born and raised in a small town near Vizag.  He agreed to come speak to us at our usual Friday meetings, and it turned out to be one of our most productive meetings yet. His background is in Chemical Engineering, so combined with his current work he had a lot of insightful information to share on policy, means and methods, and general culture around energy in India, and specifically Vizag.  We shared our ideas and he responded with constructive criticism and helped with further brainstorming.

Following this meeting, we felt it’d be best to meet again to reflect on lessons learned and general takeaways from our meeting with Suraj.  At this meeting, we were able to throw away several of our ideas after determining their irrelevance or extreme difficulty and narrowed it down to one final idea.  Pollution has been an issue brought up time and time again, and we feel that it is the biggest problem worth solving with a feasible solution.  As Vizag has such a large industry/manufacturing sector and does not have an accurate means of measuring CO2 emissions, there is room for a technological solution in this area.  We are proposing to use benchmarking to compare similar businesses’ energy and emissions each month to gain awareness and incentivize a shift in consumption and waste.  Research shows that benchmarking is a proven model in reducing energy usage, as when you see what your neighbors use, it creates a level of consciousness not otherwise experienced.  Further, we are going to make this information available to citizens in hopes that it will influence their purchasing choices and create incentive for businesses to be more “green”.  Our business model is not finalized, but we are turning to other energy utilities’ models, such as PG&E, in hopes of using them as a guide when developing our own.  However, we did throw out some initial ideas of having fines for businesses continuously exceeding set limits and having a “green business” label available for products manufactured by companies continuously setting the bar.  We believe this idea will be able to generate revenue for the city, as well as be a tool for India in reaching its new 2030 emissions goals.

The Energy Group

Chaitanya Mittal, Trevor Dowds, Natalie Chyba, Wendy Ho, Mischa Fritz, Amy Nguyen