Enhancing Affordability of Roof-Top Solar Using Communications

Abstract

As high speed wireless communications reach every rural home and become more and more affordable, stage is set to unleash what communications, especially data communications promised all these years. The promise was that it would impact all sectors and transform lives, especially for the disadvantaged; it has yet to materialise. One of the fundamental sectors it may impact is the energy sector, taking reliable power to each home. Electric power has become fundamental necessity of life; denial of lights, fans and electronics cannot be adequately understood unless one lives without these. Most low income homes in many emerging markets get poor quality grid-power, with no power or power outage for large fraction of the day. At same time, most of them cannot afford the cost of power, even with some subsidy. This paper outlines an approach and associated technologies and concepts leveraging available communications, which can go a long way in overcoming such a situation. The approach notes that most of the nations classified today as Emerging Markets, do not have much oil and gas. They have coal, which is known to be polluting, or have renewables. Most such nations have significant solar incidence. This can be leveraged, especially as prices of solar panels fall rapidly and is less than that of conventional gridpower today. Decentralized roof-top solar photovoltaic (PV) can become the most affordable solution, irrespective of whether grid is present or not. The affordability can be enhanced if it draws power from the grid, only when power is available at the lowest cost. This would require a communication link between electric utilities and homes. In fact, savings from such demand response system may pay for the communication expenses for low-income homes. Communication embedded to the systems also enables monitoring of roof-top solar system, while helping in optimal usage of power. This paper presents possible early design approach and its cost-economics in section 2. Systems with such features have been deployed widely (about 10,000 homes) in states of Rajasthan and Assam in India as well as in several other states. The monitored data and the user-responses to such deployments are presented in section 3. The cost analysis for a small home is detailed in and will be briefed in section 4. This will show that the cost savings for such deployments vary from 25% to 50%. The section also presents the approach to further reduce costs, by making the system grid-responsive, wherein it draws power from the grid, only when its costs lowest. Section 5 concludes the paper with a discussion on how this approach of using communications for decentralised solar deployment may lead to powering every home in not too distant a future.