Clarke Energy engaged with a wide range of textile manufacturers, where the predominant focus remained on natural gas–based power generation solutions due to established infrastructure, cost-effectiveness, and operational familiarity within the Bangladesh market.
Clarke Energy, a Rehlko company, is a multinational specialist in the engineering, installation, and maintenance of distributed power systems. Operating globally, we deliver local integrated energy solutions helping to balance our customers’ needs of resilient, cost, and environmental performance. Unlike other operators, Clarke Energy takes a life-of-asset approach to system integration and operation. These systems are often anchored in either gas engines, battery energy storage systems (BESS), biogas upgraders or heat pumps. These systems are fuelled by a range of low-carbon and renewable fuels such as biogas, biomethane (also called renewable natural gas) and hydrogen, or with the energy-efficient and considered use of natural gas.
Alex Marshall is a global specialist in distributed energy and low-carbon power solutions with over 20 years’ experience delivering innovative infrastructure projects worldwide. As Group Director at Clarke Energy, he has led the company’s expansion into new technologies critical for data centers, including hybrid gas-to-power, battery energy storage, microgrids, hydrogen and biogas.
Clarke Energy works closely with hyperscale, co-location, enterprise and edge data centers to deliver resilient energy systems that reduce carbon emissions and meet rapidly growing power needs. Alex serves as Vice President of the Cogen World Coalition and is a Council Member of the World Biogas Association.
Alex Marshall, Group Director, Clarke Energy, shared some insight with textile Focus.
Read the full conversation-
Textile Focus: Share with us the Latest innovative technology to boost Bangladesh’s Textile Sector?
Alex Marshall: Bangladesh’s textile mills have relied heavily on on-site gas engines for baseload power, largely because grid supply has been inconsistent and captive generation guarantees uptime. The next step is combined heat and power (CHP), where the engine’s waste heat is recovered for the process steam or thermal energy the mill already needs, rather than discarded through a radiator. This raises overall fuel utilization substantially compared with power-only generation, since the same unit of gas now serves two loads instead of one.
Textile Focus: How does your technology help the spinning industry cut costs and save energy?
Alex Marshall: Spinning is thermally intensive, particularly in dyeing and finishing. CHP captures heat that would otherwise be wasted and applies it directly to those processes, cutting the separate boiler fuel bill. On top of this, microgrids allow a mill to combine gas engines with solar PV and battery energy storage (BESS), so surplus solar generation during the day is stored and discharged during peak tariff periods or grid outages.
This reduces both fuel cost and exposure to grid instability, which has historically been a bigger constraint on Bangladeshi textile output than raw energy price.
Textile Focus: As a European brand, what is your specialty compared with others?
Alex Marshall: Clarke Energy’s distinction is depth of in-country service and long-term engine support, not just equipment supply. Gas engines are a 20-plus-year asset; the value is in maintaining performance and fuel efficiency over that lifetime, which requires local technical capability, not a one-time installation. We also work across the full transition path, from single gas engines through CHP to fully integrated microgrids with storage, rather than offering one-point solutions and leaving the rest to the customer.
Textile Focus: How do you see the Bangladesh market and your future plans?
Alex Marshall: Demand for reliable, efficient power in Bangladesh’s textile sector will keep growing as production scales and buyers increasingly require lower-carbon supply chains. We expect the market to move in stages: first toward CHP to capture the efficiency gain already available from existing gas assets, then toward microgrids that blend gas, solar, and storage as renewable costs continue to fall. This mirrors a pattern now visible in other high-density power sectors, including data centers, where operators are moving from single-source generation toward layered, flexible power architectures for the same reasons: cost, reliability, and emissions pressure at once. Bangladesh’s textile sector is arguably ahead of many industries in already having the gas generation asset base in place; the opportunity is to build on it rather than replace it.
