Ending Blackouts, One Solar Lamp at a Time

By VIKAS BAJAJ

Courtesy of T.E.R.I.One of the benefactors of The Energy and Resources Institute’s “Lighting a Billion Lives” campaign with her solar lantern in Guna district, Madhya Pradesh, June 2012.

The blackouts in northern and eastern India last week helped highlight a basic fact of life in the country: many people here do not have access to reliable electricity. The humor newspaper, The Onion, perhaps summed it up best with this headline: “300 Million Without Electricity in India After Restoration of Power Grid.”

In lieu of power from the grid, many in India, including big businesses like the software outsourcing firms TCS and Infosys, rely heavily on the diesel generators for electricity, as my colleague Heather Timmons reported earlier in the week. But those generators are expensive to run even with government subsidies on diesel and are considered a major contributor to greenhouse gases.

For many Indians, diesel is not an affordable option, and the wait for a reliable connection to the grid seems like it will be a long one given the paralysis in policy making in New Delhi and slow pace of infrastructure development around the country. As a result, many Indians have been left to improvise, often by burning driftwood or kerosene, an oil-based fuel similar to diesel.

But increasingly entrepreneurs and energy specialists are trying to find creative ways to meet India’s electricity needs. While there are dozens of examples, I’ll focus on two that I have learned about recently.

The Energy and Resources Institute, or T.E.R.I., along with others, has been working on a model to increase the use of solar lanterns in rural India. Though these devices are incredibly simple to understand – a solar panel charges them during the day so they can be used at night – they are still too expensive for many. (Basic lanterns cost as little $5, but hardy and more useful models can cost as much as $80.)

T.E.R.I., which is based in New Delhi, is trying to make these lanterns more affordable by making them available for rent for durations as short as one night. The institute’s “Lighting a Billion Lives” campaign does this on a franchise model.

“You train one woman in the village,” said Rajendra K. Pachauri, the institute’s director general. “She charges all the lanterns during the day, and she rents them out at night.”

So far, the campaign has reached 1,488 villages in 22 Indian states, according to its Web site. But Mr. Pachauri, who is also the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told me this week that this and other similar ideas have significant potential to bring electricity to many millions of people.