Husk Power Systems: Bringing Light to Rural India and Tapping Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Abstract

Lighting over 200 villages through de-centralized power plants, impacting 200,000 people’s lives and counting - Acumen Fund. Although the rapid growth of the Indian economy in the last two decades has brought prosperity to a large segment of its population, thereby leading to higher living standards, there still remain some dark spots that cast doubts on this success story. There are still many remote parts of the country which are deprived of power supply owing to lack of regular supply of electricity through normal grid connections. This scenario changed with the launch of Husk Power Systems (HPS), which was initiated after a conversation between two friends, Gyanesh Pandey in Los Angeles, United States of America (USA), and Ratnesh Yadav in Patna, Bihar, India, and their strong desire to bring change to rural India. After several attempts over five years, to generate power through various biodiesel resources, they settled on rice husk as a source for generating electricity. Husk Power Systems was started in 2007 and today, they have already lit up more than 200 villages with a typical power plant by HPS catering to around five villages depending on the number of households. Currently, they can provide power for up to 12 hours a day, which can be scaled-up to an uninterrupted 24 hour power supply. The challenge here is that there is no current demand for 24 hour power supply in remote villages where people have just started realizing the benefits of electricity and don’t feel the need for continuous power, and also don’t have adequate finances to pay for it. While working on scaling-up their business, the issue which is bothering them most is how to encourage villagers to increase their power consumption to 24 hours a day instead of just 6 hours a day.