Category — Renewable Energy

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!

The world’s second largest maker of blank CDs and DVDs is an Indian company named Moser Baer; it has recently diversified into selling (and some instances producing) movies and also launched a solar photo-voltaic business.  Located near New Delhi the company is venture and private equity funded.

Its unit, Moser Baer Clean Energy Ltd,  has just commissioned the country’s largest solar plant in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The 5 megawatt, $20 million plant uses amorphous silicon Thin Film technology, best suited to the Indian climatic conditions, and is connected to the 110 KVA local grid. The project was awarded by the Tamil Nadu Energy Development Agency, a state entity  and is being implemented under the Generation Based Incentive scheme of the India’s Ministry of New & Renewable Energy.

India hopes to develop 20,000 megawatts of solar energy by 2020 but the largest plants operating so far were only 2-3 megawatt capacity.  Solar and wind energy are still subsidized to some extent by public funding.

India’s federal Planning Commission projects an investment of $300 billion in electrical power between 2012-2017 which is the period covered by the “Twelfth Five Year plan”, according to member B.K. Chaturvedi

The commission estimates that India will see capacity addition of 100 gigawatts during the period; this cCapacity addition will result in investment of at least $100 billion. Chaturvedi says a similar investment of around $100 billion is expected in distribution and transmission during the next plan period. And, that overall investment, including generation work in progress currently, will come to $300 billion of the $1 trillion infrastructure development planned.

The bulk of this power investment will result in coal-fired power plants, but India is also investing vigorously in nuclear, solar, hydro-electric, gas and oil, bio-mass and more. This investment will be a combination of government and private spending and may include debt funded from foreign sources.

This opens up many opportunities for foreign companies across the ecosystem, despite serious challenges in succeeding in this sector in India.

North Delhi Power Ltd (NDPL), a joint venture of Tata Power with the Delhi government, has commissioned a solar power plant installed by Tata BP Solar.

It consists of more than 5,500 solar photovoltaic panels made of crystalline silicon. These absorb sunlight and convert it into electricity, to be directly fed into NDPL’s main grid line. NDPL has planned a three-fold initiative to promote solar power generation over the next three to four years. This includes setting up grid-interactive solar PV systems on the roofs of 56 of its grid substations in its network of North and Northwest Delhi, with a cumulative capacity of three megawatts.

Takeaway:   Solar and green opportunities exist across India today, joint sector opportunities such as this one involving the government should not be ignored

While President Obama visits India, a series of mid-range co-operative arrangements were initiated.

1) India-US agreement to set up a joint Clean Energy Research and Development Center. It will be backed by $50 million by both sides over five years and work to complete joint research in solar, biofuels and energy efficiency.

2) A Global Centre for Nuclear Energy Partnership. US will cooperate in India’s plans for a nuclear centre, to promote nuclear security and address threats of nuclear terrorism. To be based in Bahadurgarh, Haryana,  Memorandum of Understanding for co-operation in building the Center was signed by Dr. Srikumar Banerjee,  Secretary,  Department of Atomic Energy and Timothy Roemer, the US Ambassador to India. It will consist of four schools dealing with Advanced Nuclear Energy System Studies, Nuclear Security, Radiation Safety and application of Radioisotopes and Radiation Technology in areas of healthcare, agriculture and food.

3)  Establish an India-US Energy Cooperation Program. It will mobilize private sector expertise and resources to address clean energy-related issues both countries.

4) Agreement on technical cooperation to study India’s annual monsoon rains. Cooperation on weather forecasting for India’s crucial annual monsoon.

5)  India and the US will cooperate  on shale gas resources which will see US technology used to assess shale gas resources in India.

6) MOU on establishing and operating a Global Disease Detection Center in India, which will set up a laboratory in New Delhi designed to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.