The Indonesian tofu industry encompasses some 84,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in clusters around the country, many of them family-run businesses. Currently, the wastewater from these enterprises is released without being completely treated, producing odour, greenhouse gas emissions and pollution in both water and soil.

The lack of access to end-user financing is one of the biggest obstacles to the spread of solar home systems to the 200 million energy poor households and small businesses in India. These consumers spend a large portion of their incomes on energy sources such as kerosene, and the banking system often doesn’t reach them because they own no land title, have irregular incomes, or lack formal identification.

The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) announced today that it will fund three additional projects to widen energy access and alleviate poverty in least developed countries, made possible by 488,768 in support from the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID).

The Indian city of Coimbatore was the host of a two-day workshop on 12-13 December, launching a REEEP-funded ICLEI project on Local Renewables. The project is taking Coimbatore as both an example and a resource in energy efficiency and renewable energy for two other emerging market cities: Ekurhuleni in South Africa and the Yogyakarta municipality in Indonesia.

The founder of Himin Solar, Huang Ming has been named one of the four winners of the 2011 Right Livelihood Awards, known informally as the alternative Nobel prize. According to the Swedish-based foundation that gives the award, he was honored for “his outstanding success in the development and mass-deployment of cutting-edge technologies for harnessing solar energy, thereby showing how dynamic emerging economies can contribute to resolving the global crisis of anthropogenic climate change.”