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30 September 2006 -
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Ascent of wind Power KHORI, India — Dilip Santosh Patil uses an ox-drawn wooden plow to till the same land as his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. But now he has a new neighbor: a shiny white wind turbine taller than a 20-story building, generating electricity at the edge of his bean field. Wind power may still have an image as something of a plaything of environmentalists more concerned with clean energy than saving money. But it is quickly emerging as a serious alternative not just in affluent areas of the world but in fast-growing countries like India and China that are avidly seeking new energy sources. And leading the charge here in west-central India and elsewhere is an unlikely champion, Suzlon Energy, a homegrown Indian company. Suzlon already dominates the Indian market and is now expanding rapidly abroad, having erected factories in locations as far away as Pipestone, Minn., and Tianjin, China. Four-fifths of the orders in Suzlon’s packed book now come from outside India. Not even on the list of the world’s top 10 wind-turbine manufacturers as recently as 2002, Suzlon passed Siemens of Germany last year to become the fifth-largest producer by installed megawatts of capacity. It still trails the market leader, Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark, as well as General Electric, Enercon of Germany and Gamesa Tecnológica of Spain. Suzlon’s past shows how a company can prosper by tackling the special needs of a developing country. Its presence suggests a way of serving expanding energy needs without relying quite so much on coal, the fastest-growth fossil fuel now but also the most polluting. And Suzlon’s future is likely to be a case study of how a manufacturer copes with China, both in capturing sales there and in confronting competition from Chinese companies. Suzlon is an outgrowth in many ways of India’s dysfunctional power- distribution system. Electricity boards owned by state governments charge industrial users more than twice as much for each kilowatt-hour as such customers pay in the United States — and they still suffer blackouts almost every day, especially in northern India. Subject to political pressures, the boards are often slow to collect payments from residential consumers and well-connected businesses, especially before elections. As a result, they often lack the money to invest in new equipment. To stay open and prevent crucial industrial or computer processes from stopping, a wide range of businesses — including auto parts factories and outsourcing giants — rely on still more costly diesel generators. With natural gas prices climbing as well, wind turbines have become attractive to Indian business. Roughly 70 percent of the demand for wind turbines in India comes from industrial users seeking alternatives to relying on the grid, said Tulsi R. Tanti, Suzlon’s managing director. The rest of the purchases are made by a small group of wealthy families in India, for whom the tax breaks for wind turbines are attractive. Wind will remain competitive as long as the price of crude oil remains above $40 a barrel, Mr. Tanti estimated. To remain cost-effective below $40 a barrel, wind energy may require subsidies, or possibly carbon-based taxes on oil and other fossil fuels. Mr. Tanti and his three younger brothers were running a textile business in Gujarat, in northwestern India, when they purchased a German wind turbine — only to find that they could not keep it running. So they decided to build and maintain turbines themselves, starting Suzlon in 1995 and later leaving the textile business. To minimize land costs, wind farms are typically in rural areas, chosen for the strength of the wind there as well as low prices for land. Doing business in rural areas of the developing world carries special challenges. The new Suzlon Energy wind farm in Khori is a subject of national pride. More than 300 giant wind turbines, with 110-foot blades, snatch electricity from the air. Suzlon has expanded rapidly as global demand for wind energy has taken off. Its sales and earnings tripled in the quarter ended June 30, as the company earned the equivalent of $41.6 million on sales of $202.4 million. The demand for wind turbines has particularly accelerated in India, where installations rose nearly 48 percent last year, and in China, where they rose 65 percent, although from a lower base. Wind farms are starting to dot the southern tip of India, as well as scattered mesas and hills across central India and even Inner Mongolia. Coal is the main alternative in the two countries, and is causing acid rain and respiratory ailments while contributing to global warming. China accounted for 79 percent of the world’s growth in coal consumption last year and India used 7 percent more, according to statistics from BP. India already leads China in wind power and is quickly building more wind turbines. Suzlon sees plenty of opportunity in China and has decided to build some of its latest designs in China for the market there, despite the risk of having them copied by Chinese manufacturers. “Being an Asian leader,” Mr. Tanti said, “we cannot afford to ignore China.” A dozen Chinese manufacturers have jumped into wind-turbine manufacturing as well. They have struggled with quality problems and have limited production capacity so far, resulting in long delivery delays. Mr. Tanti said that rapid innovation and design changes would allow Suzlon to stay ahead of copycats. “It’s a time-consuming process,” he said, estimating that it would take two to three years for rivals to clone Suzlon turbines because they use unique or proprietary parts. Suzlon manufactures its turbines at two factories in India, but has begun test production at a just-completed turbine-blade factory in Minnesota, where it already supplies turbines for a wind farm operated by the Edison Mission Group and Deere & Company. It has also begun test production at a Chinese factory that will make both turbines and blades. To reach the Suzlon wind farm here, the huge rotors travel by night on special trucks for a 300-mile journey from northwestern India on a succession of paved and dirt roads. At first, “we were really confused about what was going on,” Mr. Patil said. “But now we’re O.K. on it.”
India's
booming Being a small European country with snow is conducive to economic growth. More correlation than causality, no doubt, but the three countries topping the (WEF) World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Report are Switzerland, Finland and Sweden--habitual winners all. Denmark, Singapore, the U.S., Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. round out the top ten. China fell from 48th to 54th. WEF sees the largely state-controlled banking sector as a structural weakness. China also scored poorly on penetration rates for the latest technologies and secondary and tertiary school enrollment rates. By far the most worrisome development, the WEF says, is a marked drop in the quality of China's institutions, with poor scores across all 15 institutional indicators, and spanning both public and private institutions. India moved up two places to 43 on the list. It scored well for innovation, use of technology and rates of technology transfer. But insufficient health services and education and poor infrastructure are limiting a more equitable distribution of the benefits of India’s high growth rates, the WEF finds. Overall the numbers for India appear to make for a happy tale: The Indian economy beat forecasts to record a GDP growth of 8.9% in the first quarter of 2006, propelled by growth in the manufacturing sector. That’s a contrast with past years, when the services sector was the engine of the economy, making India synonymous with the concept of outsourcing. And some economists believe the government isn’t doing enough to move these numbers along. As an illustration to growth, Financial Times reported that India's fast-growing car industry hopes to quadruple total sales to $145 billion over the next decade from about $36 billion last year, through a plan to boost research and development and increase exports. Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) said India rolled out nearly 8 million vehicles last year, including 1.3 million passenger cars, accounting for 7% of global automobile production. The world's second-largest maker of motorcycles, India is seeing a steady increase in sales of passenger cars on the back of rapid economic growth. But, car penetration is still low in India with only six to seven per 1,000 people. India's poor infrastructure remains a hurdle to growth. The car industry would require three times more power and a major upgrade of the country's burdened ports to achieve the export target. And though the country’s booming growth rates are doing little to bridge the chasm between the rich and poor, the market optimism is evident on the streets of India’s metropolises. Top international brands are wooing consumers with increasingly large pockets, swank new shopping malls now dot city landscapes and India’s real estate market is reported to be growing at about 30% annually. A casual observer might infer from India's flourishing stock markets, fast-growing mutual funds and capable private banks that the financial system is one of the country's strengths. But the shortcoming of Indian's financial system is that Formal financial institutions attract only half of India's household savings and none of the $200 billion its people keep tied up in gold. These financial institutions allocate more than half of the capital they do attract to the economy's least productive areas: state-owned enterprises, agriculture and the unorganized sector (made up mostly of tiny businesses). The more productive corporations in India's dynamic private sector receive only 43% of all commercial credit. Research by the McKinsey Global Institute indicates that an integrated program of reforms for the financial system could raise India's real GDP growth rate to 9.4% a year, roughly on par with China's. Household incomes would be 30% above current projections by 2014, lifting millions more people than expected out of poverty. Economists say the government along with resolving nagging finance and infrastructure issues also needs to ensure that populist policies don’t hinder growth. Says Surjit Bhalla, managing director of Oxus Research and Investments, “What has the government done to bring this about? The short answer is nothing, other than the central bank maintaining a competitive exchange rate. Though the good news is the capacity of the government to do damage is severely restricted, since the growth momentum is self-sustaining.” The ruling Congress-led coalition in India is limited in its ability to reform because it needs the support of Communist parties to stay in power. But the liberalization program has apparently run out of steam. Change will require a complete rethinking of the government's role in financial markets, as well as the kind of courageous political choices that alarm some policymakers. The
Best Medicine, laughter therapy: Plenty of Giggles But No Punch Lines Ho
ho. Ha ha ha. The bright yellow flier promised "a joyful after-work tuneup with therapeutic effects," and so a half-dozen stressed-out Washington types are standing in the George Washington University Center for Integrative Medicine waving their arms in the air and chanting a warm-up in this evening's "laughter therapy" class. Laughing is good for you. It supposedly opens your arteries, if you believe the research from the University of Maryland; boosts the immune system, according to a Loma Linda University scientist; relieves stress; teaches you how to breathe like a baby. So here we are, in a roomful of people practicing mirthless laughter. "Ho ho. Ha ha ha," they say, in unison. Laugh leader Siddharth Shah, who is a physician and psychotherapist says “I do a little bit of this in the shower every day. And when I do a session like this, it's as good for me as it is for the people who are doing it." Shah leads the group through the cellphone laugh, where they walk around the room and giggle like they're talking on the phone; the lion laugh, where they lift their arms like paws and roar; the lawnmower laughter, which has a couple of crank-up laughs and then full-bore guffaws. Now they're gasping for air, and one woman is shaking and starting to cough. They finish the set with a free-form bout of chuckles, snickers, chortles and giggles. It tapers down to a few snorts and hiccups, and then the expiration of a sigh. Hahahahohohaaaaamm. Humor, after all, is a reaction to the absurdity of life. So the idea of a roomful of people standing around laughing for no reason is kind of funny. Sort of. But as a concept, laughter without humor is not new. It started out as grunting noises emitted by primordial man when he was tickled, as a part of chasing and play, if you buy into the evolutionary tale mapped out by Robert Provine, a neurologist and psychologist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. After language and humor developed, the bipeds' grunting noises evolved into the ululations we now call laughing. But according to Provine, who has done field research on the subject, 80 percent to 90 percent of the times people laugh, nothing funny was said. People laugh to be agreeable. Or because they're nervous. Or trying to attract the opposite sex. Sometimes it's because they're high. In the early 1800s, promoters such as P.T. Barnum and the young Samuel Colt sold patrons a snort of nitrous oxide, then watched them stagger about, giggling and guffawing uncontrollably, to the amusement of themselves and others. Maybe there's something to the idea of dispensing with the humor. Thousands of people in 40 countries belong to laughing clubs. (In his early efforts to begin one more than a decade ago in India, founder Madan Kataria tried telling jokes but ran out of them quickly.) Senior centers in Rockville and Howard County embrace the practice. Even the Pentagon has created laughter clubs to energize its ranks. The late Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review for 30 years, introduced the idea to Western medicine after falling ill in 1964. Stricken with a degenerative connective tissue disease in his spine, he hired a nurse to read him funny stories and watched Marx brothers films to distract himself from the pain. He discovered that 15 minutes of hearty laughter could produce two hours of pain-free sleep, and in his 1979 book, "Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient," he credited laughter with reversing his illness. Ten years later, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that for patients with chronic illnesses, "laughter has an immediate symptom-relieving effect" on patients with chronic illnesses . . . an effect that is potentiated when laughter is induced regularly." Humor as inspiration for laughter may not be necessary. Don't get the joke? Don't worry about it. Humor is optional. |
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