Three years after lighting up electricity deprived remote villages in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh with power harnessed through rice husk, the team behind the venture is now looking at a similar task in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu as well.Beginning with Tamkuha, in Bihar’s West Champaran district where villagers stopped travelling kilometres to the nearest city to charge their mobile phones, the ‘Husk Power System’ designed by NRI entrepreneur Gyanesh Pandey has gone on to dispel darkness in over 125 villages since 2007.
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‘The conventional technologies and grids had failed to deliver for the pervasive energy starvation in the country and I wanted to find an environment-friendly non-conventional source and low cost of energy,’ Pandey told PTI.
A native of Bihar’s Baithania village, Pandey chucked a promising career in the semiconductor industry in the US to
return to do good in India.
The engineering and graduate management along with friends Ratnesh Yadav, Manoj Sinha and Charles W Ransler started the husk power system company aimed at bringing power to empower the rural population.
Assisted by S K Singh, a scientist in the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Pandey’s team rejigged the decades-old technology of biomass gasification deployed by rice millers in Bihar to power their mills using rice husk, perhaps the only bio-waste in the lives of rural folk.
‘The process is called gasification, where the husk is burnt in controlled conditions to produce a combustible mixture of gases (smoke). This gas is filtered and fed into an engine that drives an alternator to produce power,’ says Pandey.
The idea was not only to provide electricity but also to provide it at a rate lower than the cost of the current alternative significantly keeping a unit profitable enough to ensure its long term functioning.
The baseline price is Rs 80 per month for two CFLs + mobile charging (approx 50W) per month. Users get discount as they purchase more than 100 W. The baseline price is less than the fixed charges levied by the state grid (Rs 250 in Patna).
‘The idea is to slash the cost of the alternative by atleast half,’ says Ratnesh. Remoteness of the locations required that the operations be carried out as much as possible by the locals and that demanded the entire model to be simple enough in execution.
The mantra was to keep it cheap and simple, and after many trials, a near optimal model took shape. Around 200 locals run the operations today.