Multinational giants like GE, Siemens and Bosch are mastering reverse engineering to take made-for-India products global
Four years ago, when the buzz around total rural electrification in the country gained momentum with the arrival of the Narendra Modi-led government, engineers at the Bengaluru premises of General Electric (GE) started to look for solutions. India, according to a September 2017 report by Reuters, has more than 40 million households that need to be electrified.
By the latter half of last year, the $120-billion American multinational had found a solution and began pilot projects of its Hybrid Distributed Power (HDP) system in two villages in the state of Bihar in North India. The project is in partnership with Tata Power—the service provider of electricity. Each village is home to approximately 1,000 people, who now get access to power for basic needs such as lighting up bulbs, running fans and charging mobile phones. There are no practical limits on what can be connected to the minigrid, says the company, as it is a function of how the operator (Tata Power) is limiting or charging for the load.
This, even as the politics of rural electrification has reached a crescendo with the opposition and the government quarrelling over how many rural households and villages have been electrified—the May 2017 deadline for electrifying all villages has been extended by a year.
GE’s HDP is a single integrated power system consisting of solar, battery and diesel power. The bulk of the electricity generation is through solar power. The batteries, which are charged through solar power, are switched on at night. The diesel component of the system acts as a backup, quite literally, for rainy days.
Depending on the power needs and population of the village, either a 15 kilowatt or 30 kilowatt HDP system can be installed. If the requirement is for 60 kilowatt, then two 30-kilowatt power systems can be used.
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