The IIP India joined hands with a World Bank/Global Environmental Facility /Bureau of Energy Efficiency initiative in India for development of a programmatic approach to aggregate demand for Energy Efficiency (EE) investment in selected foundry clusters and financing these proposals at the local cluster level.

The foundry industry, which suffers from technological obsolescence, poor management practices and paucity of funds, stands to gain a lot from this intervention in terms of achieving not only huge energy savings but also addressing the pollution problem- both local as well as global.

The role of IIP is to stimulate a vibrant ‘knowledge exchange platform’ for the foundry sector, facilitating access to technological best practices and to build capacity of the local industry and service providers in helping the industry move towards cleaner production methods, leading to;

1. Enhanced competitiveness by reducing cost of production and enhancing quality of products, thereby countering both business as well as regulatory threats

2. Significantly reduced energy consumption and a corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas emission as well as emission of local pollutants

3. Improving the working conditions and drudgery of the workforce.

As part of this initiative, IIP facilitated the engagement of an international foundry expert and extensive field visits were carried out in November 2011 in Kolhapur, an important foundry cluster in India. IIP India worked very closely with the World Bank/Global Environmental Facility team, the Kolhapur Engineering Association, the local industry and a number of energy audit firms in accomplishing the following major tasks:

1. Build local capacity in energy/technology audit of foundry units. A total of 16 consultants across six agencies participated in the one day training program at Kolhapur. This was followed by hands on training in conducting energy audits.

2. Energy audits in six representative foundry units covering different types of melting furnaces, product ranges and capacities.

3. Interactive meet with the local foundry industry

Based on the outcome of the energy audit results and the cluster survey, an action plan will be recommended for adopting technology best practices. The best practice menu will provide the technological choices (based on international best practices and their applicability to the Indian foundry industry), the cost and benefit streams, risk analysis and any other information necessary to implement these measures. This would be a critical input to the World Bank/Global Environmental Facility/Bureau of Energy Efficiency initiative.

The energy savings and CO₂ mitigation potential identified at Kolhapur would also be extrapolated to an all India level to explore the feasibility of launching a national level foundry initiative.