Solar Cells Info

By Ashfaque Swapan, Special to India-West
Source: India West Online
http://www.indiawest.com/view.php?subaction=showfull&
id=1195085439&archive=&start_from=&ucat=3

For the small village of Dabkan in Rajasthan Alwar’s district, Diwali this year was greeted with a twinkling array of electrical lights just as it was all over India.  Dabkan is a remote village that is not connected to India’s electrical grid, and chances are that it will not happen in the near future, given the village’s remoteness and proximity to forests.  So for Dabkan residents, this Diwali was one with a profound difference, because for the first time in their lives, villagers are experiencing night with electrical lighting, thanks to LED technology which is powered by solar energy.

“They are all in love with the system. For them it’s something they had never imagined having before and it is so beneficial at the same time,” Dave Madan, an Indian American youth who visited the village to do a survey, told India-West during a phone conversation from New Delhi.

Madan, 24, was raised in Boston, Mass., and worked with Americorps for a year after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley before going to India.  “I spent the year traveling round the U.S. doing service work in the Americorps program and then I came to India basically to do a year’s service work here,” he said. “I am traveling around.”

Just two years ago, electricity was an impossible notion for the residents of Dabkan, according to Madan. The village is accessible only by a narrow dirt road from the nearest town three miles away and grid electricity there is prohibited by forest regulations. However, as with much of India, Dabkan does possess an abundant supply of the most common source of energy on earth — sunlight.

In March 2006, as a gift from the Grameen Surya Bijlee Foundation, each home in the village was fitted with a solar-powered lighting system, made up of a solar panel to convert sunlight to electricity, a battery to store that electricity throughout the day, and two LED bulbs to emit light at night.  “Now, instead of life stalling to a halt after sunset, families can continue to be productive long into the evening,” Madan said. “Craftspeople and other skilled laborers use nighttime hours to generate additional income, and children have the opportunity to study.”

The village primary school’s headmaster has noted the difference, Madan told India-West.  “When I first began working here several years ago, I had students in the fifth standard who couldn’t spell their own names,” Deendayal Sharma, headmaster of Dabkan’s primary school, and the most vocal proponent of the solar lighting systems, told Madan. “Students usually forgot everything taught the day before. Now that they have light at home, they all study. So much has changed. Back then, if I gave the tests that I give now, not one student would pass.”

With reduced cost of low-energy and long-lasting LED bulbs, solar energy has become an effective and environmentally sustainable source of light. Solar power also averts the health hazards of kerosene lighting, which not only harms eyes and lungs, but is also alleged to cause hundreds of deaths in India per year. Meanwhile, these systems offer a level of reliability and control that grid electricity throughout India still does not.

Over the past decade, governments and nonprofit agencies throughout the developing world have popularized the use of solar power to electrify rural areas, according to Madan. In Rajasthan alone, there are an estimated 80,000 installations in place.  For many villagers who don’t have access to grid electricity — and even for those whose supply is erratic — solar-powered LED lamps offer a real alternative.

“I don’t care to get that (grid) electricity,” Guddi Devi Raibari, a Dabkan resident, told Madan. “It goes on and off all the time. When I want light here, I just turn on the switch, and I know it will be there.”  To be sure, there are challenges. With a price tag ranging from $100 to $400, such systems are far out of reach for rural families earning an average of $1 per day — even with government subsidies of around $100.

Maintenance of solar lighting systems is also a problem. In Dabkan, two solar panels have been broken by monkeys and several bulbs have proven faulty. With no nearby facilities for repair or replacement, households have returned once again to all-but-complete darkness after sunset.

Given the formidable costs, Madan said the challenge was to bring about a change in people’s mindset and devise innovative financing techniques.  “The issue that interests me most is how to convert people’s consciousness so that people are actually interested in paying for these kinds of things,” Madan told India-West. “If you offer something like micro credit, offer them a micro loan.”

Madan surveyed 18 of the 50 households of Dabkan, and all but about two said that they would definitely be willing to take out a loan if they were offered one so they could either pay for this system if they didn’t have it, or to pay for improvements.

“Now the question of whether or not they actually have enough income for that loan is another story, (but) it’s a starting point for us to understand (these issues). Can there actually be a market for this and will people be willing to (pay)?”

Some Indian organizations have begun using small microloans to allow families to pay for the systems themselves, with payments being spread out over time as they are with grid electricity and kerosene. SELCO-India, a for-profit company, boasts 85,000 installations in Karnataka. Another organization, Noble Energy Solar Technologies, instead, charges villagers a fee for each time they recharge their solar lanterns from the village charging station.

“One of the issues probably throughout the world really is water and energy are seen as provisions of the government, and what the government will provide, people will take, and what the government won’t provide, the majority of people I’ve met with throughout India said, ‘We are not gonna do anything on our own, we are not gonna pay for it,’” said Madan. “I think the biggest barrier to all these things is people’s willingness to actually take it on themselves. I think that’s the most interesting challenge in all of this.”

The demand is certainly there, Madan added. “When the systems were installed,” Harkesh Neena, a Dabkan villager, told Madan: “I was overjoyed. Looking around at all the lights in the village, it felt just like we were celebrating Diwali.”