A clutch
of professors at the elite technology institutes are finding new applications
for solar energy and making existing ones more efficient
The IIT
campus was not ready when Saroj Nayak moved to Bhubaneswar from the US in 2012.
The condensed matter physicist had been a professor at Renssealer Polytechnic
when IIT Bhubaneswar made him a job offer.
Nayak
worked for some time from an old government building without any power backup,
struggling with the heat and frequent power cuts. His response? A creation to
harness this heat.
Dissatisfied
with the existing UPS systems, Nayak invented one that ran on solar power, got
a patent and founded a company called Karma. He and his colleagues also took
electricity to Odisha's villages, all the while being closely watched by the
Naxalites in the hills.
During
these trips, Nayak discovered that small farmers had no solar pumps either.
Since larger pumps are not economical for small holdings, he developed a
smaller solar-powered version that was ideal for 90% of the farmers in Odisha.
Today,
Nayak is not alone. Although solar energy installations have been in the
country for over two decades, few companies were practising serious technical
innovation. This is changing now, as researchers in good institutions are
developing ways of improving efficiencies and finding new applications for
solar. Specifically, some IIT professors have used their expertise to bring
significant energy efficiencies in solar installations, while creating new
markets as well.
ENVIRONMENT & ECONOMY
Bhubaneswar-based
Karma created a market for solar pumps that did not exist before. At IIT
Madras, electrical engineering professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala developed an
inverter-less solar system -also with significant energy and cost savings.
At IIT
Hyderabad, aerospace engineering professor Nishant Dongari designed a one-stop
shop solution in solar energy and formed a startup called PuREnergy .He says,
“Even in the worst-case scenario, we would like life to go on as usual.“
Heavy
rains caused power outages in Hyderabad this week, but life seems to have gone
as usual for PuREnergy installations in the city.
In his day
job at IIT Hyderabad, Dongari studies the dynamics of the upper atmosphere, a
skill that is useful around the world for calculating the path of rockets and
missiles, not to speak of complicated trajectories for anti-ballistic
missiles.Dongari puts his skills to good use, but he had been eyeing the solar
energy market since he was a student at IIT Bombay . As he saw it, most solar
energy installations were either off-grid or connected to the grid. He wanted
to create a hybrid solution optimised for any situation.
In its
short existence of a year and a half, PuREnergy has 100 small and medium
installations and four large ones. The small installations include houses and
apartments, while large installations are inside companies.
Natco
Pharma in Hyderabad is working towards shifting completely to renewable energy
and has an installation of 2.5 mw in Hyderabad, part of which was executed by
PuREnergy. “Their design brought down the structural costs,“ says PSRK Prasad,
executive director, engineering services, Natco. Total cost also came down from
`4.5 crore to `4 crore.
COST COMFORT
Such a
decrease in costs would be the first impact of improved efficiencies. In such
cases, all capital investments would be recovered in less than five years,
making solar energy attractive. Advanced technology and design improves
quality, brings down operational expenses, reduces need for land and brings the
ability to address problems quickly .
Ease of
monitoring would be an added advantage, as both PuREnergy and IIT Madras
startup Cygni Energy do remote monitoring of solar installations. Solar
installations, especially those in remote areas, are always in danger of slow
decay due to lack of maintenance.
The idea
for Cygni, based in Hyderabad but a startup from IIT Madras, began when Ashok
Jhunjhunwala and a few others tested the energy losses in existing solar
systems. They found almost all installations are inefficient, with their effi
ciency from generation to load ranging from 20% to 65%. The efficiency was
especially poor in low-power systems, mostly because of poor-quality inverters.
Jhunjhunwala
and his team then established a startup with Venkat Rajaraman, an entrepreneur
based in Hyderabad. IIT Madras and Cygni made a completely new design aimed at
high efficiencies. Their main innovation was to do away with the inverter in a
solar energy system.
Solar
cells produce direct current (DC), which is then converted to alternating
current (AC) for an application. If a battery is involved, the AC is converted
back to DC for charging and then converted again to AC for running devices. In
some current applications such as laptops and LED lighting, the AC is once
again converted to DC by the device.
The system
loses energy through multiple conversions, especially if the inverters are of
poor quality. In the Cygni system, current from the solar cells goes directly
to devices that can take a DC input. Since LED bulbs, fans, television sets and
mobile chargers can all take DC input or be tweaked to do so, the inverter-less
system can be used with all these devices. Cygni was established at the end of
2014 and got its first customer in January 2015.So far, it has done 24,000
installations, nearly half in Rajasthan and Bihar. Most them are through
government support, either at the Centre or state. All the installations are
being monitored from a network operating centre in Hyderabad.“Solar
installations stop working after some time,“ says Rajaraman, CEO, Cygni Energy
, “because there is no one to monitor them in remote locations.“
Remote
monitoring is thus a game changer for the industry , and is now being practised
by few other companies as well.
IN THE FIELDS
Government
and industry officials regard the solar pump as a game-changer as well and not
just for the farmers. “A solar pump is clean and reduces the cost of power,“
says Vinay Rustagi, managing director of Bridge To India, a solar energy market
research company. “And a pump can be used for other purposes as well.“
Officials
from the ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE) estimate that if half the
diesel pumps in the country are replaced by solar pumps, it would give the
banks a loan opportunity of `1 lakh crore.
Back in
Odisha, when Nayak did a quick study of farmers, he found about 90% of them
owned less than two acres while some 60% owned less than one acre. Water pumps
in the market were usually 2 horsepower or more and were a waste for such small
land holdings.
The pump Nayak
designed was an efficient 0.5 horsepower, which is ideal for small farmers. It
is this pump that the MNRE ministry officials and banks support and expect to
be used widely in the country .
Perhaps,
the future will bring in more IIT professors to the realm of energy innovation.
Source:THE ECONOMIC TIMES-5th October,2017
