Green Wombat

When it comes to environmental technologies, developing countries are not only a huge potential market but are leap-frogging the post-industrial world in going green from the get-go. Take Fiji. A  local renewable energy firm, Clay Engineering, brought Vodafone (VOD) mobile phone service to an off-the-grid island in the South Pacific archipelago by installing a cellular station powered by a solar array and a wind turbine. (Photo at left) That was a more sustainable alternative to lugging a polluting diesel generator up to the peak of the 1,500-foot-high (500 meter) mountain where the cell repeater station sits. Servicing such a generator would have been costly. But the station’s solar and wind array is monitored and controlled remotely via the Web and mobile phone with technology made by Silicon Valley distributed energy software company Fat Spaniel. In another sign that renewable energy software is a growth market, the Fiji project was the startup’s 500th installation.