SBA Hydro and Renewable Energy Pvt Ltd (“SHREY”)
Micro-hydro Electricity for Villages in Rural India
SHREY is building microhydro systems to provide electricity to Indian villages.
The Challenge:
- There are 579 million people in India who lack access to electricity. Even though a village is considered electrified if only 10% of its households have access to electricity, national electrification rates are still low. According to the 2001 census, only 56% of Indian households, and 44% of rural households, are electrified.
- Of the country's power sources, 66% come from thermal sources, which are increasingly scarce and lead to environmental degradation through deforestation and/or carbon emissions. The poor are likely to be the most impacted by rising shortages of conventional energy.
The Innovation:
- SBA Hydro and Renewable Energy's (SHREY) goal is to provide hydroelectric power to villages in the Himalayan Belt of northern India where, despite grid access, electricity supply is unreliable at best. Through design innovation in micro-turbines and generators, SHREY has developed a number of new turbine designs appropriate for the India micro-hydro context—customized to reduce cost and raise output efficiency.
The Impact:
- This investment will result in the provision of reliable electricity to more than 6,000 households, representing more than 30,000 people living in rural India.
- Access to power can lead to improvements in education, local enterprise and industrial growth, higher quality of life through access to information and increased productivity, and improved local infrastructure by electrifying schools, health facilities, and community institutions.
- Additionally, as a renewable energy source, micro-hydro power will offset polluting and diminishing fossil fuels. Preliminary calculations estimate that SHREY’s 1MW of hydro power correlates to an emission reduction of approximately 4,000 tons of carbon annually.