The year: 2004. The movie: Swades (Hindi for homeland). Shah RukhKhan is playing the character of Mohan Bhargava, a non-residentIndian space scientist in the US. On a trip to meet his grandmotherin India, Bhargava is appalled by the living conditions in hervillage, Charanpur, set in the plains near a river. The crowningmoment, three hours into the film, for Bhargava is when he builds areservoir across a stream to run a small turbine that generatesenough electricity to light bulbs in the forgotten village.
The Khan-starrer was not a blockbuster, but had quitesuccessfully highlighted how effective such micro initiatives canturn out to be. Today, there are several Charanpurs cropping upacross India, as startups, NGOs, villager groups and, even, largecompanies turn to standalone power plants to light up villages thatare either not connected to an electricity grid or have not-functioning power lines running through them.
Less than a year after Swades hit the screens, NTPC, India'slargest power generating utility, commissioned a 10 kilowatt (KW)biomass plant at Jemara, a small village in central Chhattisgarh,lighting up 100 households there. In the five years since then,lighting up remote villages without access to grid power has becomea big part of NTPC's corporate social responsibility programme. Theutility has set up 11 projects with a cumulative capacity of 231 KWand covering about 1,780 village homes. Five more projects with acombined capacity of 110 KW are poised to go on stream in the next12 months. (Roughly, 1 KW can run five homes, each with three 40Watt bulbs and one fan or TV running.)
OFF-GRID GENERATION THE LEADERS
Husk Power Systems
NTPC
NO. OF PLANTS
23
11
VILLAGES COVERED
50 plus
11
CUMULATIVE CAPACITY
759 KW
230.5 KW
NO. OF HOUSEHOLDS BENEFITED
9,000
1,778
STATE(S)
Bihar
UP, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan
PROJECTS IN OFFING
28
5
The NTPC off-grid systems help run flour mills, hullers, oilpressing or extraction machines and irrigation pump sets during theday and lighting in the evening hours. NTPC's "small units havebrought about transformational socio-economic change in villages,"says the utility's Chairman and Managing Director R.S. Sharma. Twocritical reasons for their success, he adds, are local participationand easy availability of raw material or feedstock.
Off-grid projects are not a new concept. The earliest reportedexample was in 2002: Bilgaon in northern Maharashtra, home to amicro-hydel project. They have been promoted by the Ministry of New& Renewable Energy (MNRE) for about two decades now. MNRE's capitalincentives are yet to make a big bang impact where it really hurtsIndia and its people- about 50,000 villages have no electricity. Atthe same time, for many years, off-grid or distributed generationprojects were not popular largely due to lack of awareness, sayexperts, predicting this could change in the coming years.
As NTPC's projects gained velocity, other projects are sprouting:an initiative in Bihar by four entrepreneurs is leading to a raft ofoff-grid power plants there. Husk Power Systems, the brainchild oftwo childhood buddies- Gyanesh Pandey and Ratnesh Kumar, both 32-created a kind of a sensation at Tamkuha village in West Champarandistrict in August 2007 when it commissioned a 33 KW plant fired byrice husk. In the months that followed, the firm repeated theinitiative by adding one project after another and, today, hasnearly 25 times that capacity covering at least 50 villages. Itsover 9,000 customers include households and businesses.
The company, funded by the MNRE, Shell Foundation, among others,charges a household a minimum of Rs 80 a month for six to sevenhours of daily supply for two CFL lamps. Businesses in market placespay as high as Rs 1,500 a month for 12 hours of supply and run theirTV and freezers in addition to lighting. "We provide discounts infee for consumers who use more," says Pandey, an electrical engineerwith a background in the semiconductor industry and now Chairman &CEO of Husk Power.
DEVELOPER
PLACE
CAPACITY
HOUSEHOLDS
COMMISSIONED ON
Husk Power
Bhuidharwa, Bihar
33 KW
480
Nov. 2009
Husk Power
Dhanaha, Bihar
33 KW
400
April 2008
Husk Power
Madhubani, Bihar
33 KW
500
Jan. 2009
Husk Power
Turkaulia, Bihar
33 KW
270
Dec. 2009
NTPC
Dhumadand, MP
10 KW
42
Dec. 2009
NTPC
Jemara, Chhattisgarh
10 KW
100
Feb. 2005
NTPC
Bhaogarh, Rajasthan
10 KW
89
March 2005
NTPC
Birhuni, UP
35 KW
405
March 2008
Customers root for the company supplied electricity. Take V.P.Singh Yadav, a medical compounder who runs a clinic offeringtreatments for ailments such as fever, cough, stomach disorder andeven eye infections in Tamkuha. After electricity came to hisvillage over a year ago, Yadav says, life has changed. "People cometo my clinic as late as midnight, you can walk around with lessfear, you don't see teenagers loafing around, children are studyingin the evening... this place will change by the time the nextgeneration comes up, he says, with a tinge of regret that hischildren (the youngest is appearing for Class X exams this year)missed the days of electricity in his village. Yadav pays Husk PowerRs 160 a month to run two bulbs, a fan and a TV for about 6.5 hoursa day.
Husk Power, operationally profitable, is reinvesting returns onnew projects: 28 more are taking shape. Pandey says the firm'ssecret sauce lies in using rice husk-bought at less than Rs 100 aquintal-as a feedstock in custom-tweaked gasifiers (machinery inwhich material ranging from bio-waste to wood chips is burnt withcontrolled infusion of oxygen to produce gas that can then be firedto run turbines). He and his team had worked for a couple of yearswith organic solar cells as also generators powered by jatropa andbagasse before deciding on rice husk as the feedstock.
"Our plants are quite unique; they use 100 per cent rice husk insmall gasifiers. We provide the lowest amount of power (30 Wminimum)to consumers, and our installation costs are one of the lowest,"says Pandey. Bihar makes business sense for Husk Power-the state hasa peak electricity shortage of 34 per cent, the highest among Indianstates.
In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, a similar initiative has met withsuccess. Rampura village in the Bundelkhand region symbolisedbackwardness in its most stark shape: a bundle of illiteracy andpoverty, wrought by unfailing drought. In January 2009, ScatecSolar, a Norwegian company, commissioned a 8.7 KW solar powerstation that charges batteries powering some 400 homes for aboutfive hours daily through a micro grid of one kilometre in length.
"This is a demonstration project from our end, and it's fullymanaged by the local community members starting from operation tobilling and collections. The households not only have CFL lamps butalso television sets," says Amitabh Verma, Vice President(Technology), Scatec Solar. CFL or compact fluorescent lamps thatconsume as less as onesixth electricity compared to conventionalbulbs.
The success of off-grid ventures highlights the willingness ofvillagers to pay top dollar for electricity. While an urban consumerpays about Rs 4.50 a unit in Karnataka, users of off-grid power payanywhere between Rs 6 and Rs 12 a unit depending on usage. Off-gridpower costs more because they lack advantages of scale.
Buoyed by recent trends, MNRE is targeting 2,000 MW capacity frommicro projects over the next 12 years under its National SolarMission, which was kicked off on January 11. In the short term,until 2013, the target is 200 MW, and the government thinks solarenergy applications are cost-effective where grid penetration is notfeasible.
"We are in the process of making a paradigm shift from supplydriven delivery model to entrepreneurial based business model todraw investors to niche areas of energy," says Gauri Singh, JointSecretary in the Ministry. The Ministry meets between 30 and 90 percent of a project's cost depending on the technology suggested andthe location. "We have a huge gap between demand and supply ofelectricity, and entrepreneurs can tap this market of unmet demandby investing in offgrid units," adds Singh.
That opportunity becomes huge, especially if seen as a means tosupplement grid power, clarifies K.P. Sukumaran, National ProjectManager of United Nations Development Programme Project on Access toClean Energy. "Offgrid power is promoted not as a replacement forgrid power but to supplement it in places where grid power cannotmeet the demand," he says.
An example is wind turbine maker Suzlon's corporate complex inPune, where a 155 KW wind-solar hybrid system supplies electricityfor about eight hours daily with the ability to automatically switchover to grid power. "This is perhaps the biggest hybrid system inthe country consisting of 20 wind generators of 5.1 KW rating withroof-top photovoltaic panels of 55 KW. This will meet 8-10 per centenergy requirement of the Suzlon campus," says P. Ravindranath,Director (Product Engineering), Unitron Energy Systems, which set upthe wind-solar hybrid unit.
Instances of such uptake may be what will make off-grid power awidespread reality in India and end up lighting up thousands ofIndian villages. Like Bhargava's Charanpur in Swades.
Tamkuha
Uchlenga
Suzlon's Corporate Complex
Rampura
DEVELOPER
Husk Power Systems
NTPC
INSTALLED BY: Unitron Energy Systems
Scatec Solar
PLACE
West Champaran, Bihar
Korba, Chhattisgarh
Pune, Maharashtra
Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh
CAPACITY
33 KW
20 KW
155 KW (100 KW wind + 55 KW solar)
8.7 KW
COMMISSIONED ON
August, 2007
October, 2006
August 2009
January, 2009
SOURCE
Paddy husk
Biomass (woody)
Wind-solar hybrid system
Solar
SUPPLY
6-7 hours daily
6-8 hours daily
8-10 hrs a day to corporate office with auto switch to grid
5 hours daily
PROJECT COST
Under Rs 50 per Watt
Rs 25 lakh
Rs 3.2 crore
Rs 50 lakh
HOUSEHOLDS BENEFITED
400 plus
134 houses
MONTHLY GENERATION: 16,000-18,000 KwH
400 plus
WHAT CONSUMERS PAY
Rs 40-45 for 15 Watt a month
Rs 30 per month or 30 kg of woody bio-mass
Rs 30 per month
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