India’s Poor: Leapfrogging the Grid July 7, 2011



One of the most powerful emergent properties of the energy and information revolutions is the way new technologies allow developing nations to “leapfrog” the ponderous and expensive infrastructure that took a century for developed nations to build. The most visible example is the explosive growth of cell phone technology, giving third world populations instant communications without decades of hard wire network-building.

The same process has been building in the renewable energy space, with the steady drop in prices, particularly for photovoltaic solar cells.

This week the AP shines a light on electrifying developments in India.

Across India, thousands of homes are receiving their first light through small companies and aid programs that are bypassing the central electricity grid to deliver solar panels to the rural poor. Those customers could provide the human energy that advocates of solar power have been looking for to fuel a boom in the next decade. With 40 percent of India’s rural households lacking electricity and nearly a third of its 30 million agricultural water pumps running on subsidized diesel, “there is a huge market and a lot of potential,” said Santosh Kamath, executive director of consulting firm KPMG in India. “Decentralized solar installations are going to take off in a very big way and will probably be larger than the grid-connected segment.”

Getsolar.com adds:

In America, almost every home in the country has access to electrical grid and all the benefits that come with that. The Associated Press notes that in India, the world’s second most populous country, more than 300 million people live without access to electricity. That amounts to roughly the population of the United States. The news source spoke with villagers in those areas and many still hope to see the grid extended to their area, but a growing number are finding it simpler and more reliable to put forward the money to invest in a small solar installation. The basic idea behind this application of solar technology is known as distributed generation, and its advantages are hardly restricted to just the developing world. Most power plants rely on economies of scale to prove workable, requiring a plant of a certain size to be economically feasible. This means, however, that miles and miles of power lines must connect power plants to the people who will ultimately use this electricity. By bringing the power generation directly to the users, as solar installations can, distributed generation reduces the inefficiency of transporting huge amounts of electricity across the country, through metal wires and expensive converters, just to get to the people who need it.

For decades, development agencies, politicians and corporations have pushed the centralized model of electrification that may have been appropriate for WPA era in the US, and Stalinist Russia, but has not been able to deliver in capital constrained developing countries.

In India, families are no longer waiting for the “Kitchen of Tomorrow” – they’re grabbing the new technology, and changing their own lives, today.



