UpDate - Vol. 16, No. 2
September 12, 1996
PEERS program participants visit Newark campus

     Decision-makers from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka who will
help chart the course for their nations' development over the
next 20 years spent a month at the University learning to do it
right.
     PEERS, the program that brought them to campus, is an
acronym for Program in Energy, Environment, Resources and
Sustainability. Jointly sponsored by the University's Center for
Energy and Environmental Policy (CEEP) and the Tata Energy
Research Institute (TERI) in India, PEERS was the brainchild
CEEP's director, John Byrne, and TERI's director, R.K. Pachauri.
     Byrne said he and Pachauri could see the potential in
"introducing influential people to the concepts of sustainable
development and then giving them the tools they need to convince
their fellow decision-makers that sustainable development is the
way to grow, while avoiding the problems Western nations now
face."
     To PEERS participants, sustainable development is much more
than just using nonfossil fuels to generate clean electricity.
     Raghavan Venkatesh, senior research executive with Crompton
Greaves Ltd. of India, explained it this way, "If you see the
composition of the group, people who come from the energy policy
sector are just 25 percent. We have persons from rural
development, nongovernmental organizations, the Indian civil
service, from private and public-owned companies. The outcome is
not necessarily the promotion of renewable energy sources or the
prevention of pollution, though that's the major dimension. It's
got other dimensions like social welfare, equity, social justice
and international justice."
     Venkatesh and 13 other mid-career government and business
professionals, educators, journalists and activists from the
three nations were at the University in July and August training
under CEEP's experts in sustainable development.
     Course work focused on giving these mid-career managers
information, specific to each country, they can use to develop
policies, programs and practices, which are aimed at fusing the
idea of sustainable growth with economic development.
     Venkatesh said one of the most valuable lessons he learned
is how to market an unpopular idea. He said India's ready supply
of coal, which could last for the next 200 years, is going to
make it difficult to sell renewables. "No one is going to listen
to me when I say, 'C'mon chaps, let's not burn coal. Look for
something else.' So, you try to package renewables in a different
way. You talk about the environmental costs and other
implications. You talk about clean coal technologies and reducing
demand."
     Part of the course work took place in Washington, D.C.,
where the visitors had meetings and discussions with federal
environmental experts, U.S. political leaders and bureaucrats and
representatives of the World Bank and the Department of Energy.
     They returned to Delaware to work on proposals for pilot
programs they will take back to each country that will implement
what they have learned. The governments of India, Sri Lanka and
Nepal had to agree to spend the money and resources on each pilot
project before their representatives would be accepted by PEERS.
     Venkatesh will work on overcoming the technical and
institutional problems that have stalled the widespread use of
wind devices and devise a plan to promote wind energy in his
country.
     His colleague Ram Chandra Acharya, an engineer with the
Electricity Development Center of Nepal, will ask his government
to create a school in a rural watershed community that will
educate people in the importance of using conservation and anti-
pollution techniques. Acharya said that most of the power
generation in his mountainous country comes from hydroelectric
plants. People who live in watershed areas need to understand how
vital it is to conserve and maintain the integrity of that power
source, he said.
     The final phase of the program comes in January when the
pilot projects are evaluated. 
                                                -Barbara Garrison