New Sapgreen (This will be last post at blogspot)

Sapgreen has been revamped. The process is not yet complete as it is intended to be an ongoing process.
The site will be an experiment for community based tree planting and environmental discussions. More about the changes are written in the following post: Sapgreen is New.

Also, the blog which is written here at blogger will hereafter be continued at Sapgreen Website's blog itself:

www.sapgreen.com/blog

Rural solar lighting - Market survey - Part 1

In our quest to know more about the rural market for solar power, we headed towards villages around HD-Kote which is about 45kms from Mysore. We understood that rural market in India cannot be generalized using the statistics that big time marketers use. Each village is different from the next village. Statistics such as "average electricity ‘outages’ across states in rural areas round the year is almost 14 hours per day" do not make much sense really. What we saw was totally different and unexpected. Here are some of our questions and the answers we found direct from villagers.

1. How is the power situation in your village?

Ans: During summers, we experience more than 12 hours of power outages but now we have just 2-3 hour of outages.

2. So, what do you use at night for lighting when there is a power outage?

Ans: During nights, we don't have that many power-cuts. Even if it is there, it is only for an hour or two.

The villagers it seemed never cared much about the loss of power for 1 or 2 hours.

3. How about a solar light for your home?

Ans: The cost would be too much for us. Moreover, we can just use a standard lead-acid battery for charging when there is power. So, why do we need to buy an extra solar panel?

Although a lot of subsidies are provided to reduce solar panel costs, the reality is that grid electricity is also heavily subsidised in villages. The time for ROI just doesn't justify the costs involved in buying a solar panel. Moreover, villagers don't really care about ROI and stuff. What matters is the initial investment amount involved. 

To summarize, solar lighting is not a real necessity in villages which are electrified. Power outages in the grid do not justify buying solar panels (at least at its present costs). A good, cheap battery management system would have a lot of buyers though.

And there was more to learn about rural people. They expect product warranty. They expect the product to be as good as the products in the city. They expect products to be comparable in prices to even chinese products. They expect high value for low prices. They ask for suggestions from fellow villagers before deciding on a product (so unlike city people).

You meet these demands and you have a winning product. To understand the bottom of the pyramid, you got to see it for real.

The launch myth

Here are some brands that had no launch at all: Starbucks, Apple, Nike, Harry Potter, Google, William Morris, The DaVinci Code, Wikipedia, Snapple, Geico, Linux, Firefox and yes, Microsoft.

Read the full article at Seth's blog...

Google Maps

Finally, Google Maps has Mysore in high resolution. This should be useful in a lot of different ways. The satellite images however are at least an year old. This I can tell from construction activities captured by the satellite images.
Example use: We can mark locations where we planted trees directly on the map. See below.

Sapgreen Park on Wikimapia

Can be done..

SELCO: The company brought light to 75,000 homes since 1995 making profitable business at the same time. It is difficult to even imagine that a product worth Rs.18,000 could be sold to a household with less than Rs.50 per day income. Yet, the company did. Today, they have brought extra income into the households of so many people. They have done their bit in reducing the global warming problem. They won the Ashden awards twice, once in 2005 and again in 2007.

NEST: Another solar company which innovated in making a smaller version of CFL lantern making it more affordable. A lantern just Rs.1200 thereby making it much more affordable to the poorest of the poor. The company sold 50000 lamps and now plans to sell it in African countries as well. Won the Ashden award once.

Looking at these companies, I get hope. Business can co-exist with environment. Business can co-exist with people. No business model is not impossible.

LED

Since a few weeks, the sapgreen page and blog looked inactive. The main reason was that there were no new stories to tell. The trees are being planted on a regular basis. The number is one short of 250 now. The rains which initially eluded us have come back. Looks like the Karnataka chief minister's prayers have succeeded to some extent :)

I, personally however didn't stop blogging and have been fairly regular at livejournal. Our work too had a different direction apart from trees and we were concentrating more on that. Being an electronics engineer, new technology never fails to interest me. Not the Ipod type of technology. Rather, its the advancement in basic technologies that is more interesting. The incandescant bulb was created in 1879 and the technology remained the same for more than a century. It is only recently that CFLs began replacing the bulb. Now, even CFL bulbs are on the verge of getting replaced by the semiconductor revolution. LED or Light emitting Diode is one of the most efficient types of light source. The LED delivers much greater brightness and consumes just a fraction of the power required by conventional light bulbs. Furthermore, LEDs last almost for a lifetime. Even under adverse conditions, you can expect LEDs to last for at least 6-10 years. Compare that with an incandescant bulb that lasts for a few months or a CFL which lasts for 2-3 years. The only drawback with LED as of now is the relatively higher cost. The payback time (as compared to CFL bulbs) in terms of reduced electricity bills is 2-3 years. However the payback in terms of reduced carbon emissions is immense.

Even more important are the benefits LEDs offer when combined with solar technology. LEDs consume less power and hence a smaller sized solar panel is sufficient to power it. The cost of the LED is more than offset by the savings in the solar panel. A solar enabled LED home lighting system would thus mean a light source with minimal maintenance and minimal recurring cost for a lifetime. We have been working on this technology for a while now and it looks ever more promising. I will keep this blog updated on the happenings.

Hurray!!! Site is up!!

:)