Rice husk, solar energy to solve power issues

If all goes well, rice husk and solar power — two very unlikely entities — will together provide rural India with a twin solution to its problems of power shortage and lack of storage for agriculture produce. What's more, the evolving system promises zero emission of pollutants as well.

Updated on: Mar 29, 2012, 02:26:34 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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If all goes well, rice husk and solar power — two very unlikely entities — will together provide rural India with a twin solution to its problems of power shortage and lack of storage for agriculture produce. What's more, the evolving system promises zero emission of pollutants as well.

The government's Solar Energy Centre has managed to make use of rice husk and solar power, which are both being wasted at present, to come up with a technological marvel that would prevent wastage of food grains in rural India. "Around one-third of the agriculture produce goes waste in the absence of adequate storage facilities," said SK Singh, director of the centre run by the ministry of new and renewable energy. "Our technology can help set up low-cost cold storages in rural India."

Through this project, the ministry provided electricity to every household in a village in Bihar's West Champaran district in August 2007. The rice husk is burnt to produce enough energy for powering a turbine and producing electricity. As of now, there are 60 mini-rice husk powered electricity plants that light 25,000 households in different parts of the country.

The emission from the rice husk plants is coupled with energy generated by solar thermal plates to run a cold storage with a capacity of 15 tonnes.

The project, undertaken in collaboration with Thermax and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), has gone past the experiment stage and is set to be rolled out in rural India. "Bihar could be our first destination, because integrating the solar unit with rice husk power systems would be easy there," said Gireesh B Pradhan, secretary, ministry of new and renewable energy.

To dispel the belief that solar energy is only meant for villages, the Solar Energy Centre has also developed the world's most efficient solar-based air-conditioning unit, which can run for over eight hours in urban commercial complexes. "Three or four such units have already been installed in companies such as TVS Motors," said an official from private partner, Thermax.

The Centre is also developing a diesel-solar hybrid unit to power industrial units at an estimated cost of Rs 90 lakh. "The additional cost can be recovered in less than five years, and it will run effectively for 20," said another scientist.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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