Natalie Obiko Pearson
By Natalie Obiko Pearson
The villagers of Dharnai in northern India had been living without electricity for more than 30 years when Greenpeace installed a microgrid to supply reliable, low- cost
solar power.
Then, within weeks of the lights flickering on in Dharnai’s mud huts, the government utility hooked up the grid — flooding the community with cheap power that undercut the fledgling solar network. While Greenpeace had come to Dharnai at Bihar’s invitation, the unannounced arrival of the state’s utility threatened to put it out of business.
“We wanted to set this up as a business model,” said Abhishek Pratap, a Greenpeace campaigner overseeing the project. “Now we’re in course correction.”
It’s a scenario playing out at dozens of ventures across India’s hinterlands. Competition from state utilities, with their erratic yet unbeatably cheap subsidised power, is scuppering efforts to supply clean, modern energy in a country where more people die from inhaling soot produced by indoor fires than from smoking.
About as many people in India are without electricity as there are residents of the US, and the number is growing by a Mumbai every year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to bring electricity to every home by 2019 by leapfrogging the nation’s ailing power-distribution infrastructure with solar-powered local networks — the same way mobile-phones have enabled people in poor, remote places to bypass landlines.
“We are facing the searing impact of climate change and we spend more than 6 percent of our gross domestic product in adapting to its consequences,” Modi told Fiji’s parliament yesterday, saying technologies such as wind and solar mean “we don’t have to seek old pathways to prosperity.”
Modi’s vision is also championed by the World Bank, General Electric and BlackRock-backed SunEdison, which say switching from old-style centralised networks to microgrids is a cheaper, faster solution to bringing 1.3 billion people, mostly in India and Africa, out of the dark.
India’s state utilities risk crushing that model before it gets off the ground as they continue a policy of supplying farmers and the poor with cheap power.
“The issue isn’t whether people can pay for power,” said Vivek Gupta, co-founder and director of Saran Renewable Energy Pvt, which suffered unannounced grid arrivals when building microgrids in Bihar. “They don’t want to pay because they know the government gives it for free if the grid comes.” Bina Devi, 55, who squats on her heels in a dirty beige sari, says she’s grateful to Greenpeace for bringing the kind of modern energy needed to light schools, run health clinics and refrigerate food.
Husk Power Systems, which has built microgrids to supply about 200,000 people with power from rice husks, has had “huge problems” with disconnections when the grid appears, said Chief Executive Officer Manoj Sinha.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Natalie Obiko Pearson
The villagers of Dharnai in northern India had been living without electricity for more than 30 years when Greenpeace installed a microgrid to supply reliable, low- cost
solar power.
Then, within weeks of the lights flickering on in Dharnai’s mud huts, the government utility hooked up the grid — flooding the community with cheap power that undercut the fledgling solar network. While Greenpeace had come to Dharnai at Bihar’s invitation, the unannounced arrival of the state’s utility threatened to put it out of business.
“We wanted to set this up as a business model,” said Abhishek Pratap, a Greenpeace campaigner overseeing the project. “Now we’re in course correction.”
It’s a scenario playing out at dozens of ventures across India’s hinterlands. Competition from state utilities, with their erratic yet unbeatably cheap subsidised power, is scuppering efforts to supply clean, modern energy in a country where more people die from inhaling soot produced by indoor fires than from smoking.
About as many people in India are without electricity as there are residents of the US, and the number is growing by a Mumbai every year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to bring electricity to every home by 2019 by leapfrogging the nation’s ailing power-distribution infrastructure with solar-powered local networks — the same way mobile-phones have enabled people in poor, remote places to bypass landlines.
“We are facing the searing impact of climate change and we spend more than 6 percent of our gross domestic product in adapting to its consequences,” Modi told Fiji’s parliament yesterday, saying technologies such as wind and solar mean “we don’t have to seek old pathways to prosperity.”
Modi’s vision is also championed by the World Bank, General Electric and BlackRock-backed SunEdison, which say switching from old-style centralised networks to microgrids is a cheaper, faster solution to bringing 1.3 billion people, mostly in India and Africa, out of the dark.
India’s state utilities risk crushing that model before it gets off the ground as they continue a policy of supplying farmers and the poor with cheap power.
“The issue isn’t whether people can pay for power,” said Vivek Gupta, co-founder and director of Saran Renewable Energy Pvt, which suffered unannounced grid arrivals when building microgrids in Bihar. “They don’t want to pay because they know the government gives it for free if the grid comes.” Bina Devi, 55, who squats on her heels in a dirty beige sari, says she’s grateful to Greenpeace for bringing the kind of modern energy needed to light schools, run health clinics and refrigerate food.
Husk Power Systems, which has built microgrids to supply about 200,000 people with power from rice husks, has had “huge problems” with disconnections when the grid appears, said Chief Executive Officer Manoj Sinha.
WP-BLOOMBERG
