Back in 2014, Greenpeace invested US$400,000 to set up 70 kW of photovoltaic cells on the rooftops of public buildings throughout the village of Dharnai, a community of about 3,200 people in the Indian province of Bihar. The scheme also included batteries to store solar power for use when the sun was not shining. The village had been without electricity for three decades, so this project was welcomed with some excitement.
However, problems emerged almost immediately, and when dignitaries arrived to inaugurate the grid, villagers protested that they wanted “real electricity, not fake electricity”! By this they meant power from the central grid, generated mostly using coal. From the outset, the solar-plus-batteries system could not cope with demand and villagers were asked not to use things like televisions, fridges and incandescent lightbulbs.
In the end, for Dharnai, the project was an indirect success – it highlighted the plight of the village, and the following year the village was connected up to the regional electricity grid. Participation in the solar scheme fell. Electricity from the grid was also cheaper than that from the solar scheme. After three years the batteries stopped working and were never repaired, so while much of the infrastructure remains intact, the solar power is largely unused, barring some running of irrigation pumps which is offered for free. The main project site is now used as a cattle shed.
The best that can be said about this is not realising that seriously complex systems don’t survive in non-seriously complex places. A slightly harsher criticism is where in buggery was the maintenance budget?
The real answer is to laugh like a drain of course.
The village had been without electricity for three decades,
What happened. Had their leccy been removed ? Had a cow eaten through the cable ?
Had the British organised it and it was destroyed bevause it reminded them of volonial oppression ?
After three years the batteries stopped working
Stupid Indians! Everyone knows that batteries last more than a decade without significant loss of capacity and can then be easily and cleanly recycled.
70 kW of photovoltaic cells… 3,200 people
Amazing that this didn’t make a difference… Perhaps this amount of power generating capacity per head is what the greenies think is appropriate?
They’d have done more good giving the villagers $125 each to spaff as they chose.
If the impoverished villagers had been without electricity for 30 years where did all those previously (and ironically still) unusable televisions, fridges and incandescent light bulbs suddenly appear from?
“They’d have done more good giving the villagers $125 each to spaff as they chose.”
They could probably have bought a little petrol generator each, or at least one per household.
Love the idea of “fake” electricity.
@ Steve
RR want a large subsidy because there isn’t anyone who can make the pressure vessel for the SMR and they don’t want to fund it themselves. Plus it’s about 1/3 the size of existing nuclear plants (so hardly small) and has millions of parts so is complex.
Nothing like a nuclear sub reactor in every town.
They (we) are trying to get India to install renewables, such as windmills. Trouble is, while windy days are roughly spread across the year in the UK, in India the wind only blows in the monsoon months. So for 3/4 of the time the windmills will be totally useless.
MC,
“They’d have done more good giving the villagers $125 each to spaff as they chose.”
Well, yes. This is a classic example of Milton Friedman’s 4 ways to spend money. People in charities are spending other people’s money on other people, so how careful are they going to be with it? Solar power is some cool shit that they want to do, not what helps people.
One of the reasons I don’t give many of them money. Sightsavers, because I figure that there aren’t many people going blind who would want to do something else with it.
@Ottokring – “What happened. Had their leccy been removed ?”
From https://india.mongabay.com/2021/12/solar-power-station-at-bihars-first-solar-village-is-now-a-makeshift-cattle-shed/ we find “Sources said that the villagers had electricity before 1981 but they lost the connection after a transformer stopped working and due to other issues such as power theft.”
From https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-trumps-solar-in-india/ we find this example:
“Kumar’s family received one compact fluorescent light bulb and a wall outlet to charge their mobile phone. The power would be free for six months and then cost 70 rupees per month. That comes to about $1, but a steep price tag in a place where poor people earn, on average, the equivalent of about 30 cents per day.”
So it was a very small amount of power for a high price. But it turns out that the villagers ended up very pleased with the project:
“One month after the rollout, Greenpeace invited Bihar’s former chief minister, Nitish Kumar, to inaugurate the solar village. A head of state visiting a small village under the glare of television cameras is a huge deal, and the citizens knew it was their best chance to get a permanent solution.
Children held placards and the adults chanted their mantra asking for “real” electricity.
One week later, trucks rolled in and set up a 100-kW transformer in town, connecting Dharnai to the grid.
Power is now free for Kumar and his neighbors who are below the poverty line. Others pay 3 rupees per kilowatt-hour of electricity.”
So they’re all happy now as the village has a grid connection, and they can ignore the white saviour’s vanity project which provided the catalyst to get “real” electricity installed.
The village had been without electricity for three decades
This is in a country that recently landed a rover on the moon’s South Pole & is also a beneficiary of UK foreign aid. Does one sense a certain incongruity?
“ Sources said that the villagers had electricity before 1981 but they lost the connection after a transformer stopped working and due to other issues such as power theft.” “
When I was working in India in early ‘95 supporting a client who was intending to bid for state wide mobile phone licences Bahir was one of the poorest, if not the poorest, states. A Dutch friend who’d worked there doing some humanitarian work on behalf of his Government said it was the most corrupt place he’d ever worked.
We’ll done those villagers for playing the system.
I’ll take a culture seriously when they manage to feed their children. Until then they’re little more than barbarians.
Which gives pause when one considers your Prime Minister. Rather you than me.
70,000 W / 3,200 people = 21.875W per head.
But if they have to set energy aside in daylight to run say, 6 hours of evening usage, knock off a third.
Do Greenpeace not know how to do division? Or do they just not understand watts?
‘Does one sense a certain incongruity?’
When I think of the UK foreign aid, I’d term it idiocy. Of course a quick google shows Oz foreign aid to India was $A20 million in 2020-21.
Cause or effect?
“Do Greenpeace not know how to do division? Or do they just not understand watts?”
Spokesperson for Greenpeace “Whats?”
On this lovely Autumnal morning I walked along the Sussex beach and saw a large proportion of the 116 Rampion offshore wind farm turbines doing precisely f-all.
How good to know that Rampion 2 will be adding another 90 before long.
“This is in a country that recently landed a rover on the moon’s South Pole & is also a beneficiary of UK foreign aid. Does one sense a certain incongruity?”
The foreign aid thing is just about making people feel good, like a lot of charity donations are.
If you actually want to help the poor, buy some really good wine from South Africa or tip the girl who gave you a lap dance. Apart from the fact that you get some great value wine, more of the money goes into the pockets of poor people to do what they want than into wanky government or charity projects.
Which probably explains why the transformer was never replaced when it blew up, the locals were too poor (in cash terms AND political connection terms) to stump up the required graft to get the transformer replaced.
Only when the focus of the worldwide press was on the village did anything of substance actually happen. All the green shitola was just what was required to highlight the problem / embarrass the local politicians to get shit actually done.
Wouldn’t surprise me if they stole the transformer from some town up the road that was from the wrong tribe / caste or whatever and thereby “didn’t deserve electricity”.
Yeah, but never mind all that hard luck sob story stuff. Didn’t you know India is on the Moon!
Pooperpower 2030!
I cannot pay my doctor bill,
but Brownie’s on the moon
The price of food is going up,
but Brownie’s on the moon.
I cannot pay my doctor bill
Better hope your leg don’t break.
Here at the Southern tip of Africa our electricity is rationed in a process called load-shedding. Depending on the degree to which generation is fucked up beyond all belief, we can be powerless for four to twelve hours a day, usually two hours at a time though it can be four hours. Previously I used a petrol genny. Now we have gone rooftop solar with big fat lithium batteries bolted to the wall. Payback period compared to the weekly gasolino budget is fifteen months. Although heavy power appliances like kettles, stoves and geysers require severe discipline in use, simply for the quality of life improvement it has been worthwhile. Compared to grid electricity no it is no saving, it is horribly expensive. Compared to running the genny for even two hours a day, yeah, what a saving. Viva Solar Viva.