At the frontier of transitioning from fossil fuels towards cleaner solutions
Renewable sources can now be harnessed to generate electricity at a cost that is even lower than the electricity produced through coal and other fossil fuels. ITEL Foundation is working on developing indigenous technologies that can reduce India’s dependence on imports and drive progress towards becoming self-reliant in various areas of climate technology.
While solar power costs a fraction of what fossil fuel-based electricity costs, India's solar manufacturing is heavily dependent on imported Silicon-based solar cell technology. For a country aiming to lead in clean energy, this dependency presents a strategic and economic vulnerability. ITEL is driving indigenous innovation across the solar value chain, working towards localizing core material manufacturing in India and preparing to leap ahead with next generation solar PV technology - Perovskite.
Indian companies today set up cell manufacturing largely using imported technology and raw materials. Towards the larger goal of self-reliance, ITEL is focusing on indigenizing raw materials and components, and developing next generation technology including Na-ion and long duration Iron-air batteries as scaleable solutions to long duration storage needs. Moving from cells to packs is where Indian design can compete with China. ITEL is bringing researchers and industry together to build homegrown pack designs, and building a Power Electronics Consortium to drive Indian product design in the domain.
Given India’s position in moving towards a greener, more sustainable future, ITEL is working on initiatives to strengthen India’s grid for electricity transport. ITEL proposes High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) grid infrastructure to move power efficiently over longer distances, with power electronics as they key enabler.
In the current scenario where almost all DISCOMs (power distribution companies) in India run at a loss, strengthening power distribution demands both technology and better data. This includes smart metering, AI-driven power theft detection, identifying losses and overloading across the network and additional storage within the power distribution network.
ITEL is working on Green hydrogen which offers a third source of green electricity that can deliver both electricity and heat, and even be produced biologically.
India generates several million tons of biomass and urban waste every single year. Majority of this is burned, leading to GHG emissions, alarming levels of pollution, and loss of material that can provide cleaner sources of energy. ITEL is working on leveraging agricultural and urban waste to generate three valuable outputs:
Beyond energy generation, this approach reduces emissions and reliance on fossil fuels, and closes the loop between waste, energy, and resources. It powers industry, transport, and communities, while the compost produced along the way returns nutrients to the land and improves long-term soil health.
Decades of subsidy-driven chemical fertilizer overuse has resulted in declining soil health, depleting groundwater, eutrophication of water bodies, high greenhouse gas emissions, and a growing dependence on imports to sustain the cycle. ITEL believes that the path forward lies in compost from waste, combined with biofertilizers and biopesticides as alternatives to heavily subsidized and environmentally taxing agricultural inputs.
Independent researchers and startups working in materials, chemistry, and biotech require laboratory space for R&D and prototyping. While such facilities are available in academia, they rarely offer open access or align with short-term commercial needs. ITEL is building a Sustainability Innovation Centre that will serve as a common platform for research, prototype development, technology validation and startup incubation. The Centre will bridge the gap between laboratory research and industrial deployment by enabling indigenous technology development and supporting startups, and accelerating the scaling up of sustainable innovations.
India's rising plastic use has outpaced effective collection and recycling, resulting in significant resource loss and pollution. Addressing this requires moving beyond fossil-based plastics toward a genuinely sustainable, circular alternative.
ITEL’s approach rests on four pillars:
Together, these efforts aim to shift India from fossil-based plastics to biodegradable alternatives, delivering less pollution, better resource recovery and a cleaner future.
Nearly everything we build and consume today is derived from fossil carbon, and much of it persists for centuries as waste and degrading ecosystems. ITEL is focusing on developing alternatives: bio-inspired, renewable, circular, and upcycled materials engineered to meet benchmarked performance standards, then designed to be reused or returned safely to the earth rather than discarded. ITEL’s work spans across bio-inspired hybrid materials, bamboo-based composites, boards upcycled from plastic waste, and compostable and biodegradable packaging to serve India’s rapidly growing e-commerce industry and packaging demands.
ITEL continues to advance recycling technologies, aiming at making recycling and upcycling a profitable, scalable and economically viable process. This extends to
Beyond these focus areas, the broader materials circularity effort extends to construction waste, electronic waste and more.
Water is increasingly becoming a scarce resource, and it becomes critical that India adopts more efficient systems and controls as part of the distribution network and ensures equitable allocation of water resources. Towards this, ITEL proposes the use of solutions like IoT-based sensors, smart metering, dashboards and alerts.
Water reuse becomes equally important. ITEL proposes a system in which grey water (from sinks, showers, and laundry) is treated through decentralised systems and reused for flushing, gardening, cooling, and cleaning. Black water (from toilets and kitchen waste) undergoes advanced treatment to ensure safe discharge or non-potable reuse, closing the loop on water consumption across homes, offices, and industry.
ITEL is working with companies addressing a structural problem in India's water treatment industry. The core component - the membrane is largely imported, making the system more expensive, slowing down installation and making the supply chain dependent on foreign manufacturers. The focus is on providing a cost-effective water treatment solution for Indian industry by manufacturing hollow fiber membranes indigenously, with no imported components.
Conventional reverse osmosis (RO) systems waste significant volumes of water and rely on high-pressure pumps, driving up both energy use and operating costs, a burden that falls hardest on small communities. Capacitive Deionisation (CDI) technology offers a more efficient alternative. Using biomass-derived carbon electrodes made in India, this non-RO, low-pressure approach achieves high water recovery with substantially lower energy demand than conventional RO systems.
Across the globe, nearly fifty percent of all electricity consumption goes into heating and cooling - whether for homes, offices, industries, or data centers. This huge demand is currently powered mostly by fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas. Combined with inefficient heating and cooling systems, this has contributed heavily to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and accelerated climate change.
This demands a different approach, where the heating and cooling of a heat-pump and chiller are both utilized, maximizing the effective Coefficient of Performance (COP). ITEL has taken up the challenge to develop pathways to do this in a while ensuring that heating and cooling from green electricity becomes cheaper than that from fossil fuels.
To address rising GHG emissions, worsening air quality and reduce dependence on fossil fuels, it is imperative that India moves towards electric vehicles across the fleet. ITEL is developing pathways to electrify passenger vehicles and light-to-medium goods vehicles, alongside retrofitting existing two and three-wheelers to electric. For heavier, longer routes, ITEL proposes a shift towards electric trucks and Compressed Biogas (CBG) trucks, and also aims at driving the shift towards green vehicles for agriculture and construction.
To ease the urban commute - making a 15km journey possible in 20 minutes - ITEL is developing HASHTIC, a 100% green, uncongested, and affordable transport for existing Indian cities. As India’s GDP grows, this also demands faster, more efficient good transport across the country. Towards this, ITEL proposes HASHTIC Goods, an end-to-end green transport system capable of transporting goods anywhere in India within 24 hours.
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