Abstract
Rapidly developing countries like India face numerous challenges related to social and environmental sustainability, which are associated with their fast economic growth and rising energy demand, climate change, and widening disparities between the rich and the poor. Recently, a number of claims have been made in the literature that the prospects of alternative development pathways in emerging economies in Asia are becoming more likely, and that these economies might even leapfrog Western initiatives. This paper contributes by reporting on the five most visible and established initiatives in the area of off-grid PV solar energy in India, specifically homing in on the innovative business models that are evolving. We develop a new typology of upscaling dimensions in order to analyze these five initiatives. They are found to be quite successful, but have difficulty in terms of reaching the poorest of the poor (deep upscaling) and bringing about required institutional change (institutional upscaling).
Highlights
Developing countries like India face numerous challenges related to social and environmental sustainability, which are associated with their fast economic growth and rising energy demand, climate change, and widening disparities between the rich and the poor
This paper aims to contribute to this literature by substantiating some of the claims with new evidence on the five most established and visible solar energy initiatives in India (SELCO, AuroRE, THRIVE, Noble Energy Solar Technologies Ltd. (NEST), and D.light Design)
Our assessment of the upscaling of the five enterprises is summarized in Table 4, based on an analysis of their past performance and ongoing progress
Summary
Developing countries like India face numerous challenges related to social and environmental sustainability, which are associated with their fast economic growth and rising energy demand, climate change, and widening disparities between the rich and the poor. A number of claims have been made in the literature that the prospects of alternative development pathways in emerging economies in Asia are becoming more likely, and that these economies might even leapfrog Western initiatives (Berkhout et al 2009, 2010; Hultman et al 2011; Kaplinsky 2011; Romijn and Caniels 2011; Binz and Truffer 2009). This literature argues that globalization, the development of science and technology capabilities in non-Western countries, and rapidly growing local markets are changing the geography of innovation. A growing number of the world’s business innovations will in the future come not from ‘‘the West’’ but ‘‘the rest’’’ (The Economist 2010). Levi et al (2010) argue that ‘‘India is not likely to offer major breakthroughs, but it will create increasingly cost-effective business models for supplying energy in developing economies.’’ it is argued that this shift in innovation from the West to the rest has important implications for the direction that innovation processes are taking, with a more direct interest in developing products for the poor and with substantially lower environmental footprints
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