CGI Meeting: Cooperation and Partnership Key to Sustainable Change

From September 23 to 25, Nick Sonntag, Westport Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and New Partnerships, attended the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting to announce the Westport Commitment to Action.

Nick gives us his thoughts about this significant meeting of minds, and some of the highlights:

It was an amazing meeting and I felt truly privileged to be there. The exceptionally positive energy of the meeting, the high quality of the people attending and the vast range and scope of the commitments made by hundreds of organizations were all, in a word, 'astounding.’ President Clinton is an exceptional human being and is clearly using his remarkable network, charisma, intelligence and clarity of message to great advantage to mobilize change towards a sustainable future in all economic sectors, within all social groups and across all developed and developing economies.

It was an overwhelming three days with not a moment to spare for those who wanted to extract value from the presentations and available participants. CGI has a very clear focus on resolving poverty, assisting the underprivileged and promoting sustainable development. Between the annual meetings, there are a range of CGI forums covering topics from energy, technology, education, and communication, to share information and meet via conference call, and sometimes face to face.

This year’s theme was 'Design for Impact' and the workshops and panels concentrated on how to take specific projects up to scale to have a much larger impact as quickly as possible. You couldn’t help being impressed by what has been done within these commitments and the literally hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of people who have received some benefit from the projects since CGI began six years ago.

One of the most impressive was how Coca Cola worked with the government of Tanzania to effectively build an efficient supply chain (from scratch) to distribute critical medicines across the country. Did you know that Coca Cola has over 20 million 'official' points of sale globally that are visited at least once a week by a Coca Cola delivery service?

Another highlighted commitment was Proctor & Gamble, who are distributing their water purifying 'packets' globally at such a rate that they are committed to saving one life per hour due to drinking contaminated water for as long as P&G is in business. I couldn't help but relate and support these objectives, and be totally impressed with the range of commitments – money, people and facilities - being made by corporations, NGOs and governments.

I have been in the sustainability 'realm' for some time and what I saw here was a realization that sustainable change was not the result of a philanthropic contribution – although it can often be the trigger – but rather what is needed is a clear systems approach that leverages technologies, processes, policies, partners, money, etc. towards a sustainable outcome. The overriding mantra at the meeting was that through cooperation and partnership across all scales, sectors and groups, almost anything can be accomplished.

A very memorable meeting.

Telecom “Tower Power” in India Gets Natural Gas Boost from Westport

In July, we wrote about Westport’s participation in the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). On September 24, to coincide with the CGI annual meeting in New York, Westport announced its Commitment to Action to CGI. Westport will apply its expertise and technology, in partnership with others, to develop on-site power for individual mobile phone towers in India.

The three-year project, labelled Tower Power: Helping Rural Communities Establish Clean Energy Solutions, will ultimately switch five towers to natural gas or other gaseous fuel. It is the vision of Development Alternatives, one of the project partners in India, to reduce emissions from mobile phone towers, which currently consume about 2 billion litres of diesel fuel per year and emit more than 6.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2). Telecom towers are the largest consumers of diesel in India – more than railways.

Eighty-two percent of India’s existing 390,000 mobile phone towers are connected to the electrical grid; however, only 169,000 of those have reliable connections, causing telecom dependence on diesel-powered generators. With the telecom market in India growing to an estimated 500,000 towers and by 10 million customers per month (about 333,000 new customers each day!) by 2015, reliable power is essential.

Add to this is the fact that many villages near telecom towers are not on the grid at all. By generating power on site, the project team hopes that any residual electricity can be directed to areas that currently lack power.

There’s a clear opportunity for a cleaner solution - such as natural gas or biomass - to service the mobile phone towers and bring power to nearby people, while reducing levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The solution will involve developing a natural gas or biomass engine and fuel storage using available fuels, potentially pipeline gas to biofuels, depending on location and sources. An initial tower will be selected and four more will follow by 2015.

Westport is facilitator and a technology provider to this project, and will use its experience in engine technology and cryogenic storage to help design a solution for the telecom towers. Westport will recruit other partners and financial supporters to make this commitment a reality.

This specific use of natural gas power is new to Westport, but natural gas and other gaseous fuel engine technology is the core intellectual property of Westport. We have applied our knowledge for markets from oil-field power generation to pickup trucks to Class 8 trucks and beyond.

If successful, there’s potential to apply this option to other countries or regions where electrical grids are slow in development, unreliable or non-existent. There is the possibility for parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and perhaps China to apply this type of solution.

As part of the CGI efforts to tackle some of the world’s most pressing development issues, Westport was invited to make a commitment to improve life somewhere in the world. Applying core strengths to this challenging issue and partnering to create natural gas or biofuel engine-powered towers will provide a win to the local people, mobile phone users and environments of the tower locations in India. Westport and its employees win as well – through the satisfaction that so many improvements can be made from switching the tower power to natural gas or biofuel.