Category — Renewable Energy

As cell phones have proliferated in India, so have the number of instances where owners forget to charge their devices or where the owner’s home has an extended power outage and is unable to charge the device. People have come up with hand cranked chargers, solar devices and more to fill the gap. Now Nokia is introducing a bicycle charger for the millions of Indian who may ride a bike to work or for work.

Nokia Bike Charger: handlebar attachment

Pedal power drives system which comes with a charger, bottle dynamo and a phone holder which attaches to the handlebar of the bicycle. 10 minutes of bicycling gives 28 minutes of talk time.

Dynamo for Nokia Bike Charger

The kit sell for about $32 and goes on the market this month.

Takeaway: Appropriate innovation is what causes Nokia to be the leader in India, despited any trouble they may have elsewhere. Take that Steve Jobs

Companies such as Astonfield Renewable Resources Limited and San Jose, CA based Sun Edison are counting on India’s solar energy market for succsess . Astonfield,  is building a 250 MW solar photovoltaic power plant in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

SunPower Corporation and Enterprise Business Solutions (EBS) have established a joint venture to build a $110 million manufacturing facility. SunPower in Maryland  and EBS also plan to construct a chain of solar power plants, including rooftop solar projects on government buildings, across the State of Punjab to generate nearly 1,000 MW of power over the next two years.

Look for many more of these deals as India expands its solar production from virtually nothing today to 20 gigawatts over the next decade or so.

UK Company Atlantis Resources announced that it will be building a 50 MW tidal power project in Gujarat’s Gulf of Kutch. The project, a first for Asia, could be scaled up to 200 MW in the future, according to the company.

Previously the state of Gujarat has announced plans for the largest solar farm. It has nuclear energy production at Kakrapar and is expected to benefit from a 10,000 MW  nuclear energy park built with foreign technology, probably American, at Mithi Vardi.

Opportunities for western companies engaged in any part of the energy production, distribution and capital system continue to abound in India.

The International Energy Agency predicts the U.S. will have 17 GW of solar capacity by 2020. Both India and China, starting from very low bases have ambitious plans to beat that number. India aims to build up to 20 GW of solar energy by 2020.

In December the country auctioned 620 megawatts of solar projects to 37 companies, such as Lanco Infratech Limited, KVK Energy Ventures, and Rajasthan Sun Technique, a unit of Anil Ambani’s Reliance Power Ltd.  Other companies selected  include Indian Oil Corporation (a public sector undertaking) , automaker Mahindra & Mahindra Limitd,  construction company Punj LLoyd Ltd. and Azure Power.

The auction awarded 470 megawatts of solar thermal capacity and 150 megawatts of photovoltaic capacity. For photovoltaic projects, energy from the sun is converted directly to electricity using semi-conductor like technology, while in solar thermal projects, the sun’s energy is first used to make steam which is then used to generate power.

The average bid for solar thermal projects was for 11.48 rupees per kilowatt-hour compared with the government rate of 15.31 rupees. Deepak Gupta, secretary of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, said  that the average bid for photovoltaic plants was to sell a  kilowatt-hour of electricity at 12.16 rupees (27 U.S. cents) compared with the government’s proposed rate of 17.91 rupees. The global average rate solar thermal developers need to earn is about 28 U.S. cents (12.70 rupees) a kilowatt-hour, according to New Energy Finance data quoted in Business Week.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “At current capital costs of 150 rupees-160 rupees million for each megawatt, solar projects are only profitable if tariffs are at least 14 rupees/kWh,” said Narasimhan Santhanam, co-founder of Energy Alternatives India, a consultancy firm. The Journal also quoted Deepak Verma, chief operating officer at consultancy Emergent Ventures India,who  said “in order to build viable projects at these low tariffs, developers will have to cut corners and squeeze vendors.”

Returning Chinese expats, called sea turtles, have helped in the transformation of that Shanghai, Beijing, Shen-zhen and much of the country. We are now seeing evidence of similar threads with returning Indians.

New York educated engineer Gyanesh Pandey, returned to India after spending years with International Rectifier, a company that makes power chips. He and three friends with similar backgrounds, founded Husk Power Systems a company that has installed  65 small power units that serve a total of 30,000 rural households in the eastern state of Bihar. The company, partly funded by Silicon-Valley venture capitalist Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is currently installing new systems at the rate of two to three each week.

The technology developed by Pandey uses the waste husk from locally grown rice as the fuel. Rice Husk, an amorphous and low density fuel produces a gas with high tar content and was historically used in dual fuel systems where diesel was the primary input. Much of rural India is off the power grid; lighting and power to charge cell phones is provided by diesel generators.

Applying the idea of appropriate innovation to India, where labor is cheap, Pandey hypothesized that while dirty gas can clog the engine, if the engine is cleaned before the clog begins to hamper its operation seriously, you can build a sustainable product. They got their gasifier fabricated at a local workshop, procured a local CNG (compressed natural gas) engine from a small supplier and modified it to make their prototype.

According to an item this week on the New York Times website, “The company expects to have 200 systems by the end of 2011, each serving a village or a small village cluster. Its plan is to ramp that up significantly, with the goal of having 2,014 units serving millions of clients by the end of 2014.”

The India Expert does not know if Husk Power will transform rural India. But there are a thousand such innovators hard at work across India today and some of their innovations will transform not only India but parts of the developed world as well. Expect some impact in five years and significant impact by 2020.  You read it here first!