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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

"experts in renewable energy."

In a country like India, there is a huge problem to solve when it comes to basic necessity like Electricity for everyone. Specially in smaller towns and villages. Since you mentioned renewable energy, I am sure there is a huge potential there.

The problem is that the electricity grids (or transformers) are just not enough for everyone. So in many small towns/villages, they do something called "load shedding" and power cuts are frequent even if there is electricity available. Hardly there are areas where there are no transformers or grid but most of the times, they are not functional or just badly managed.

Find a way to create enough energy AND then channel it efficiently as well. You have a winner right there.

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This is a huge problem that we're chipping away at.

I'm only starting to get involved in the energy group, but I know that we've had a project focused on providing off-grid solar energy (http://sharedsolar.org/), as well as some software to model the costs of grid rollout across countries such as Myanmar (http://networkplanner.modilabs.org/). The idea is that this research would later be used to back funding proposals from entities such as the World Bank.

If you can crack portable power supply using solar energy, there is a huge huge market here. For e.g. most parts of southern India are scorching hot most part of the year. Land is cheap in rural areas. Power cuts are common 8-10 hours a day during the summer. I really wish the government invested in solar grids - we really should be able to generate surplus electricity using solar.

This is an idea that I've been thinking about for a while now. One of the issues I couldn't figure out how to overcome was the need for more electricity as people get a taste of how electricity can change their lives. Since installation of the solar station is subsidized and the villagers are essentially only paying for electricity they use, unless what is being paid is more than the maintenance cost of the solar station there is no more money to expand the capacity unless you get grants from World Bank or other entities.

How do you make this a completely self sustaining model where expansion is built in to the model without charging the users more money than they can afford? Can you charge the power users more money than the basic user? e.g. if basic user is paying $10 to use X kilowatts and makes $15 in income from that electricity, then the power user who uses 10X kilowatts can be charged $140 under the presumption that the power user uses that extra electricity to generate an income > $150 for themselves. The profits can then be put back into expanding the solar station capacity.

Hi, I'm also from SEL. In addition to some of our work (which is generally about shared solar), some interesting companies that are thinking about (and providing their own solutions to) the financing question are http://www.selco-india.com/ and http://simpanetworks.com/ Not endorsing their work necessarily, but worth a look at, for someone interested in this stuff.

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