EnergyVaasa, the largest energy cluster in the Nordic countries, chose the 25-year-old, engineering student Pentti Itkonen as its Energy Ambassador.
In a press conference held on 18th October at Citec’s premises at Navi Mumbai, Pentti Itkonen spoke about his interesting global journey from Kittilä in Northern Finland to Norway, US, Ecuador, Brazil, Spain, Thailand and India. Pentii is spending a week at each of the chosen countries, meeting and influencing the key stakeholders of renewable and green technologies.
India was selected of all the locations Citec had on offer for the Energy Ambassador’s visit. This was a natural choice, as Citec started up operations in India almost 10 years ago and currently employs almost 400 in India, with offices in Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai. This makes India the second largest Citec company in terms of amount of employees.
In this journey, Pentii Itkonen could experience a project where experts from many countries work together to come up with the best solutions to the customer’s needs. Thus, Itkonen became specifically more acquainted with one of waste-to-energy power plant projects designed by Citec. In this project, the customer is from Switzerland and the plant is located in the UK.
Pentti Itkonen commented: "It’s amazing to be in incredible India; I have to admit that this has probably been the destination I’ve been looking forward to the most. The people at Mumbai office have welcomed me with fascinating Hindu ceremonies and I was honoured to start off my week like that. It was interesting to discover how Citec is working globally and specially the Indian operations. We also discussed over a certain waste-to-energy project."
One of the highlights of Itkonen’s visit was on October 16th, when Mr. Alexander Stubb, Finland’s Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade met with Citec’s senior management including CEO Martin Strand , managing director for India Nasir Mulani, the director of Citec India Arun Tyagarajan and the Energy Ambassador in Mumbai.
On the same day, a business delegation organised by Finpro visited Citec at Mumbai, which included top level company representatives from Indo-Finnish companies. Citec presented the company’s competence, its global offering as well as its top-class industry references.
"In an agro-based country like India, bio-power has a growing demand. Nevertheless, solar and wind power are also areas where the future is heading towards. Citec is also working on such projects. Aiming for a cleaner environment, we are proud to support the Energy Ambassador campaign", said Mr. Nasir Mulani.