Process control guru and Control columnist, Béla Lipták, took his message of the potential of alternative energy sources, including solar/hydrogen plants and their affect on the automation industry, to Indian instrumentation and control engineers during a three-week tour in January.
Lipták’s tour began with a speech at the Mission Innovation Conference in Pune, where he addressed about 950 engineers from various industry, government and academic institutions, who were meeting to discuss fresh mechanisms for collaboration. He also spoke at various meetings in Mumbai, where he addressed over 170 instrumentation engineers and managers at the ICB/Tecnimont meeting. He also spoke in Baroda, Bangalore, Chennai and New Delhi.
He met with students from the College of Engineering and Cummins College of Engineering for Women, both in Pune, and Madras Institute of Technology in Chromepet, Chennai.
At all these events, Lipták outlined his vision of a “Third Industrial Revolution” based on renewable and sustainable solar/hydrogen energy, and supported by process control and instrumentation professionals. Lipták compared the situation on the planet to a ship on which everyone is a passenger reacting individually to the perceived crises of growing resource scarcity and global warming. His message to his audiences was that, as process control engineers, they would be the ones to “plug the leaks.”
