Innovating for Clean Air India: Meet our Clean Air Testbed cohort

In October 2020, the Innovating for Clean Air (IfCA) programme team reached a major milestone – the launch of our Clean Air Testbed activities promoting innovation for clean air in India. 

The Innovating for Clean Air in India testbed pilots involved a cohort of 17 high potential UK and Indian SMEs developing clean air innovations and electric vehicle solutions. Out of those, 9 deployed their solutions on the Clean Air Street in Bengaluru – a collaborative initiative between the Connected Places and Energy Systems Catapults, the Directorate of Urban Land Transport, the Indian Institute of Science and Urban Morph.  The rest of the IfCA SME cohort will carried out experiments in multiple locations across the Bengaluru city, including office buildings, residential areas, schools and university campuses. 

Air Quality

Airhead

Working in collaboration with a team of expert designers, scientists, and researchers, Airhead have developed a unique mask that protects people from particulate matter and harmful gases found in city air, and therefore reduces the risk of the most common health problems related to air pollution.  

Airhead deployed 10 of their pollution masks for 2 months. Testbed pilots with regular commuters and Bengaluru’s traffic police were designed to support Airhead’s growth plans and provide a roadmap of successfully launching and scaling in India. In addition, the experiments aimed to encourage active mobility (such as cycling and walking) and demonstrate a tangible solution for improved health, wellbeing, and clean air in India.  

Arbnco

Arbnco is a building performance technology company developing disruptive and scalable solutions for the global market. They provide real-time monitoring of the effects of the indoor environment on health and wellbeing and enable organisations to understand how the quality of their real estate affects occupant satisfaction and productivity. Their solutions also allow organisations and their key stakeholders to manage energy within their portfolios.  

In Bengaluru, Arbnco worked with Global Business Inroads and 91Springboard – a coworking space – to deploy its Arbn Well system. Arbnco deployed 4 of their air quality monitoring sensors to measure and visualise indoor air quality and support office managers to improve the health and wellbeing of occupants.  

EV Vehicles

City EV

CityEV provides EV charging infrastructure for lamp-post or other unmetered street furniture utilising a combination of advanced hardware & software to designs smart charging technology which can be installed anywhere.  

CityEV has worked with EEE Taxi, an all-electric taxi fleet, to install a charge point at the company site Bengaluru. The company has also installed a charge point at the British Embassy site in Chennai. 

Energeo

Energeo create unique data for towns and cities by digitally studying the built environment- using sources such as satellite imagery and LiDar – to automatically identify the most beneficial locations to deploy low-carbon technologies such as Solar PV, Heat Pumps and EV charge points.  

Using their geospatial technology, Energeo has analysed the following for the Directorate of Urban Land Transport (DULT) in Bengaluru to advise on the optimal position of EV charging infrastructure: 

• Width of road and footpath  
• Mapping quantum of on-street parking locations  
• Mapping availability and private parking in residential spaces  
• Turnaround of parking in the area  

EV Technology

EV Technology aims to make the transition of vehicle fleets to electric as easy as possible by analysing and advising on everything from infrastructure requirements and installation to managing and monitoring vehicles and eco-driving training.  

EV Technology has collaborated with EEE Taxi, one of the largest all-electric taxi fleet’s in India. EV Technology has adapted the existing platform EEE Taxi and created interfaces for the data feeds being used by the company to run their taxi operations. In addition, EV Technology has provided telematics devices to be installed in the EEE Taxi vehicles to capture relevant data. The objective was to create a single portal that can be used by EEE Taxi operators to access all the information they need and to identify insights that can be created by considering the interaction of multiple data points. 

GreenEnco

GreenEnco provides strategic and risk management consulting services for renewable energy including technical and financial services across the complete solar PV project lifecycle and energy storage projects. They offer smart energy management solutions using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that demonstrated up to 10% generational gain on average.  

GreenEnco has installed a solar carport with battery storage and EV charging infrastructure on the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus. The major system components include an innovative solar module, battery storage integration and DC fast charging unit.  

Oxto Energy

OXTO Energy has developed an innovative energy storage technology that delivers safe, scalable and low-cost storage. Using simple design principles with the fewest possible components, the robust device ensure very limited maintenance over a long lifetime of 25-30 years and works alongside any power application from wind turbines and heavy-industry to EV charging infrastructure.  

OXTO Energy has researched the potential applications for their flywheel in India, including case studies and simulation.