Singapore chases green dollars in clean-tech race

May 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

(Reuters) – White-gloved hands carefully pack azure blue solar cells at a vast new S$2.6 billion ($1.85 billion) plant that Singapore persuaded Norway’s Renewable Energy Corp (REC.OL) to build in the city state.

The plant is the world’s largest of its type making solar wafers, cells and panels that harness the sun’s energy.

Luring REC was a major coup and key element of Singapore’s drive to become a global hub for clean-tech investment, development and education and a center for the carbon market.

The clean-tech sector is also part of the government’s efforts to try to gradually shift one of Asia’s most energy-intensive economies onto a greener footing as well as tap a boom in green energy and services in the region.

“We believe that Asia is going to be a huge market for clean-tech products and solutions and we want to make sure Singapore is plugged into this entire market place,” said Goh Chee Kiong, director, clean-tech, at the government’s Economic Development Board, or EDB.

The country faces keen competition from Japan and South Korea as well as from China, now the world’s top solar panel maker and the leading market for wind power. India has also sharply increased support for renewable energy and green buildings.

“The rate of urbanization is fastest in Asia. Therefore, it creates a lot of additional burdens on cities and the need for green solutions is simply accelerating as a result,” Goh said in an interview.

PILLAR

The government wants the clean-tech sector to become a major pillar of the city state’s booming economy, which is already a regional center for financial services, petrochemicals, semiconductors, education, shipping and aviation.

It has rolled out a series of investments, tax sweeteners and other incentives since 2007 to achieve its goal.

This is a well-rehearsed formula that has helped the economy of five million people become one of the richest in the world on a per-capita basis, and one of the most nimble as it tries to compete with rivals such as Hong Kong and Shanghai.

The city’s clean-tech sector employs nearly 10,000 people and the aim is to reach 18,000 people by 2015.

REC’s plant, which officially opens later this year, already employs 1,200 people and sits on a one square km plot of recently reclaimed land in the city’s Tuas industrial area.

“One of our criteria among many reasons for selecting Singapore was the fact there was land available,” said John Andersen Jr., REC’s executive vice president and group COO. The size of the Tuas site is all the more remarkable given Singapore only has 710 sq km of land.

REC received more than 140 proposals from around the world for a next-generation solar production plant. In the end, availability of skilled labor, tax incentives, government support and Singapore’s investment environment clinched the deal, Andersen said in an interview from Norway.

“One of the things we like about Singapore is that it is well-regulated, there is transparency and they have a strong focus on clean technology. You don’t get surprises,” he added.

Government support for research and development was also key.

CARBON HUB

The government has set aside S$700 million to develop R&D in the sector and has announced 200 scholarships for doctoral degrees in clean technology as well as rolled out clean-tech courses for students to ensure a flow of skilled workers.

To boost the sector, the government has created a solar energy research institute. It has also announced a 50-hectare (125-acre) clean-tech park aimed at creating, testing and commercializing products such as energy-efficient buildings, waste treatment and electric vehicles.

Other firms drawn to the country include Vestas (VWS.CO), the world’s top wind turbine maker, which has committed to spend S$500 million over 10 years to develop a major R&D center.

Sweeteners, such as low trading and company taxes have drawn 30 carbon firms to the city state. Clean-energy project developer Tricorona (TRIC.ST) of Sweden has set up its global administrative headquarters in Singapore.

German utility E.ON (EONGn.DE) recently moved its clean energy project development team — whose task is linked to the creation of tradeable carbon emissions offsets — from Malaysia.

Russia’s Gazprom (GAZP.MM) chose Singapore as its Asia base for LNG and carbon business.

“It’s more the quality of life, the efficiency. Singapore has all the support sectors that we need — banks, legal and accounting firms. This is really a hub for Southeast Asia,” said Edgare Kerkwijk, managing director of Asia Green Capital, a renewable energy investment firm based in Singapore.

LABORATORY

For all its business acumen, the government has been accused of not putting in the same effort to cut the nation’s growing greenhouse gas emissions, which at roughly 12 metric tons per capita are higher than some European countries.

Singapore is not obliged under U.N. treaties to commit to binding emissions cuts but has pledged, at a minimum, to cut emissions by 11 percent from projected levels by 2020 from 2005′s output and has rolled out a blueprint.

Green groups, such as WWF, think the government should be more ambitious by pledging absolute cuts in its carbon emissions, said Amy Ho, managing director of WWF Singapore.

The government, though, says it is doing much more and wants to turn the city into a test-bed for new technologies.

It has already announced programs for electric vehicles, smart and micro-grids as well as trialing solar panels on top of public housing estates and carparks in 30 locations.

“The next phase is making Singapore a living laboratory,” said EDB’s Goh. “The idea is for Singapore to be the site of first adoption, the site of demonstration, the site of test-bedding. This is a key selling point,” he said.

(Editing by Anthony Barker)

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Obama elevated dialogue with ‘emerging global power’ India

May 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 27 (IANS) The US says the Obama administration felt it important to elevate its dialogue with New Delhi as India is a ‘a great and emerging global power’ with which the US has a significant range of interests.

‘I think the strategic dialogue speaks for itself,’ State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley told reporters Wednesday when asked to give a sense of US-India relations in the first 17 months of Obama Administration.

‘India is a great and emerging global power. Our range of interests are significant in terms of the environment, in terms of regional security, in terms of counterterrorism, economic issues,’ he said.

‘We have very strong cultural ties to India, so we look forward to the strategic dialogue,’ he said referring to the June 3-4 inaugural India-US strategic dialogue led by Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

‘It’s something that the Secretary and the President (Barack Obama) felt important to elevate the level of our coordination and cooperation,’ he said. ‘So we look forward to the dialogue.

‘I think our relations with India have never been stronger. We are talking about the relations between the largest and oldest democracies in the world. We have a great deal in common and we look forward to the meetings next week,’ Crowley added.

Asked about a report that Pakistan has asked for US help in bridging the trust deficit with India, the US official said trust deficit was essentially a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan, but US will continue to encourage both of its ‘friends’ to enhance their dialogue and cooperation.

‘Well, the trust deficit, as it’s been called, between India and Pakistan is most significantly a bilateral issue between Pakistan and India,’ he said.

The US, Crowley said, had ‘encouraged both Pakistan and India to enhance its dialogue in a cooperation’ as it was ‘friends with both countries’ and has ‘strong and strengthening relationships’ with both.

‘We are gratified that both countries seem to be moving in a direction that – to see that dialogue become deeper. So we will continue to encourage both countries to pursue the commitments that both have made and pledged publicly.’

Asked what role the US had played in India banning over 100 terrorist organizations and Pakistan arresting an army major in connection with the failed Times Square bombing, Crowley said: ‘First of all, these were steps taken by India and Pakistan.’

Security and counterterrorism were an ingredient of its dialogue in the US relationship with both countries, Crowley said describing it as ‘a shared challenge that the United States, India, Pakistan, other countries have.

‘It’s a global challenge. So we welcome the efforts of these countries to try to reduce the threat not only within the region, but more broadly.’

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)

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`India”s identification with US has clear limits,” says expert

March 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

New Delhi, Mar.10 (ANI): India’s identification with the United States has clear limits and it will resist any notion that it can be used as an instrument of US policy or as a counterweight to China, says leading international strategic expert, Mr. Adam Ward.

Mr. Ward, Director of Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, says “India is not deterministically pessimistic about its relations with China. But the balance of suspicion lies in the direction of Chinese not American objectives”.

“To an outside observer, India’s foreign policy will be driven by an independence that is historically informed, as well as by the requirements of a very stringent regional security environment, and a sense of scepticism about the justice of certain international institutions and regimes. India’ attachment to multilateralism will be coloured by the shape of institutions that give multilateralism formal expression,” Mr. Ward said during his keynote address at the “Global Governance 2025: EU-U.S.-India Dialogue” organised at Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

The day-long dialogue was organised jointly by the National Intelligence Council, Atlantic Council, Institute for Security Studies, Transatlantic Policy Network and ORF.

Noting that India’s diplomacy has gone trough several stages since the cold war: the process of dehyphenation from Pakistan; the development of a regional role in South Asia; and now the expansion of its international reach to the east and the west, Mr. Ward said for it, at issue is how it is to shape its strategy amid the changing global dynamics and what objectives it will define for itself as a consciously rising power.

“India’s status as a rising power is underpinned by economic dynamism but also the diplomatic deftness with which it has leveraged US and Chinese misgivings about each other to be taken seriously by both and thus to extract some strategic benefit,” he said.

He said it would be ludicrous to suggest that America’s relative decline will be rapid and stark. “In aggregate form its capabilities are enormous. But there are increasingly valid questions to be asked about whether the US can not only successfully set the international security agenda but summon the means to achieve specific and critical outcomes. The assumption must be that it will be able to do so less and less outside of the acquiescence or open support of other major powers. And it will have to haggle more — with less.”

“In theory, America’s predicament opens up new vistas of strategic opportunity for those who would seek to occupy the ground. The irony however is that this opportunity has coincided precisely with a certain loss of nerve and a loss of that sureness of touch for which China’s diplomacy has long and rightly been famous. At the height of the international financial crisis, in which Chinese stability and assurance stood in such contrast to the risk of a Western meltdown, Beijing resisted the evident temptation to grasp at a more explicit leadership role. Pleased to have its influence acknowledged and its views more deferred to, China however had no wish to assume the onerous burdens and distracting entanglements of leadership,” he said.

Mr. Ward said there is little to suggest that China will pursue reckless policies, but it does seem more likely to assert its interests more actively. It may move from the pretence of a foreign policy supposedly built on a values free, omni directional, win-win approach to the hard reality of tough choices. In making these, Beijing will probably be less inclined to seek an international respectability whose terms are defined by other states. It will probably also be more sensitive to the evolution of a multipolar Asia whose organising principle, to the extent that it has one, is a certain precautionary alignment against China.

“To break out of this confinement it may explore new diplomatic avenues. Fresh attempts to peel some major American partners away from alignments with Washington may follow,” he said.

Mr. M.K. Rasgotra, former Foreign Secretary and President of ORF Centre for International Relations, said there was an immediate need for drastic changes in the United Nations structure, taking into account the reality of today’s world power balance. He also underlined the need for better and stronger international cooperation to fight menaces like terrorism and drug trafficking.

Mr. Sunjoy Joshi, Distinguished Fellow, ORF, called for joint research and development (R & D) efforts from big nations to tap new forms of energy, especially solar, to transform the world scenario.

Other participants included Mr. Banning Garrett, Mr. Mathew Burrows, Mr. Giovanni Grevi, Mr. James Elles, Mr. William Burke White, Mr. Luis Peral, Rear Admiral (Retd) Raja Menon, Dr. Sanjaya Baru, Amb. Chinmaya Gharekan, Amb. TCA Rangachari and Mr. Siddharth Varadarajan. (ANI)

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US keeping ‘great regional power’ India fully informed: envoy

May 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 13 (IANS) US is keeping India, ‘a great regional power’, fully informed about its Pakistan strategy as it works with Islamabad to shift its focus from India to the insurgent threat on its western frontier.

‘My job is with regard to Afghanistan and Pakistan… In all steps in the process we keep the Indians fully informed,’ US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Tuesday on the US policy for Pakistan.

‘India is a great regional power. I have a great respect for India,’ he said, noting New Delhi itself has a deep interest in the region and has a key role to play in resolving the crisis in its neighbourhood.

Holbrooke said he had already held consultations with the new Indian ambassador to the US, Meera Shankar, but would not say what were US expectations from India.

‘The Pakistani Army has traditionally been arrayed in a conventional deployment in the east, against India,’ he said.

‘We must work with Pakistan so that it has the resources and training to recalibrate from its current conventional threat posture to one that addresses the insurgent threat on its western frontier.’

‘Successfully shutting down the Pakistani safe haven for extremists will require consistent and intensive strategic engagement with Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership,’ Holbrooke said.

The envoy said it was vital to strengthen US efforts to both develop and enable Pakistani security forces – both the military and law enforcement – so they are capable of carrying out sustained counter-insurgency operations.

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CPI looks forward to a non-BJP, non-Congress govt. at Centre

April 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Hyderabad, Apr 9 (ANI): Communist Party of India (CPI) general secretary A. B. Bardhan has expressed confidence of forming a non-Congress and non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Government after the forthcoming general elections.

Bardhan while addressing a news conference here on Wednesday said India no more can be fitted in Congress Party and BJP thus some other collation should be voted to power.

“India cannot be fitted into a so-called two party system. We are in for coalitions and there should be a coalition. And we think that the coalition that should be voted to power should be non-Congress, non-BJP Government, which the grand alliance in Andhra is, and which all the alliances that we have forged into are trying at the Centre,” said Bardhan.

The Communists are spearheading a loose grouping of smaller regional parties popularly known as the ‘Third Front’, which pitches itself as an alternative to Congress and BJP-led alliance.

The Communists pulled out of the Congress party-led UPA Government last year over the issue of nuclear deal with the United States.

Amidst all these trends, the Communists are hoping several fence-sitting parties, who in the past have allied themselves either with the Congress or the BJP, will this time join the Third Front. (ANI)

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Advani files nomination, raises black money issue

April 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Gandhinagar, April 8 (IANS) The Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial aspirant L.K. Advani Wednesday filed his nomination for the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha seat and promised that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), if voted to power, would strive to bring back black money stashed in tax havens abroad.

‘The NDA will contest the Lok Sabha polls on the three planks of good governance, development and secularism, mentioned in the BJP poll manifesto,’ he told reporters after filing his nomination papers at the Gandhinagar district collector’s office.

He was accompanied by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and state BJP president Purshottam Rupala.

Advani, former deputy prime minister, has been contesting successfully from this constituency, which also includes parts of Ahmedabad, since 1991. However, he chose not to contest in the 1996 elections.

This time, his main rivals are Suresh Patel, a sitting legislator, of the Congress and noted artist-activist Mallika Sarabhai who is contesting as an independent.

Advani told reporters the government needs to know if there is any Indian whose money is deposited in Swiss banks.

‘I wrote to the prime minister (Manmohan Singh) on the black money issue and he has replied in the affirmative,’ Advani said.

‘Why should our (India’s) money be lying in banks abroad? If we pursue the matter, which the NDA would do it anyway when voted to power, India would have all the financial resources to complete its various developmental projects,’ he said.

‘Whatever funds are required for the development of the country would be arranged. There were doubts raised by the Congress that the projects such as the Golden Quadrilateral (highway project) and East-West Corridor would need a lot of funding which the NDA provided for during its rule at the centre,’ he said.

‘If we could bring back all the money of Indians stashed abroad, there would be no dearth of funding for any project. The government of Germany had recently asked for a list of German individuals whose money was stashed away in a Swiss bank. The government of Switzerland had revealed names of about 300 German nationals whose money was lying in Swiss banks,’ he said.

The US administration has also approached Switzerland with a request to reveal the names of US businessmen who have their money stashed away in Swiss banks, he added.

Advani had started raising this demand in the run-up to the Group of 20 (G20) summit in London, also attended by Manmohan Singh, where the issue was discussed.

He said the NDA is committed on the issue of good governance and the BJP had also promised in its manifesto.

Praising Modi, he said: ‘Other states in the country could follow the good governance practices of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.’

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Solution to problem in Sri Lanka lies in devolution of power: Mukherjee

March 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Kolkata, Mar 1 (ANI): Union External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Sunday said that the military option would not solve the Lankan issue and implementation of the 13th amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution would be a significant step to bring a political solution to the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka.

This amendment will entail devolution of powers in the island nation.

“Ultimate solution to the ethnic problem lies not in the military success but in the proper devolution of power. India and Sri Lanka had made an agreement in 1987, which followed the 13th amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution. This amendment should be effectively implemented through the recommendations of the high power committee consisting of all party representatives, set up by the President Mahinda Rajapaksa,” Mukherjee said on the sidelines of international conference.

Pranab Mukherjee had earlier said humanitarian crisis has been building up and it is very essential for the Sri Lankan government to accord a safe passage to the civilian population.

Mukherjee reiterated India’s demand seeking cooperation from Pakistan to nab culprits behind Mumbai terror attacks.We have already stated that Pakistan is committed bilaterally and internationally. They should fulfill their commitments by dismantling the terror infrastructure on its soil. The perpetrators of Mumbai terror attacks should be brought to justice,” the Foreign Minister said.

He, however, refused to comment on the recent massacre in Bangladesh, saying that it was an internal matter of that country.

“We want the development, peace, stability in all our friendly countries, and of course, in Bangladesh. I wish success to the elected government of Bangladesh,” Mukherjee added.

There was a two-day mutiny by Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) personnel ver pay demands. (ANI)

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