I am back praising the country for Innovation, this time its one of my favourite future fields, Alternative sources of Power Generation. A Start up from Bihar has come up with s solution for generating power from Rice Husk. Like they say Necessity is the mother of all invention, and availability is the father. This start Up has taken the problem of Indian farmers i.e no electricity and decided to solve it with the locally available source, Rice Husk.

An Indian company called Husk Power Systems is bringing electricity to some of the most rural parts of India by using rice husks as fuel. Rice husk is a by-product of the rice growing process and is generally dumped into landfills, but by using it to build miniature, off-grid power stations, they generate electricity for around 500 households for 8 to 10 hours a day per each power plant that requires just 3 employees to operate and maintain. The company has set up 25 of these eco-friendly plants till now that serve around 50,000 villagers. Husk Power Systems has received numerous accolades for their miniature power plants including a nomination at the finals of BBC’s World Challenge prize.

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In 2007 at the University of Virginia, where Manoj Sinha is studying for a master’s at the Darden School of Business, he and a fellow student, Charles Ransler, teamed up with another engineer from Bihar, Gyanesh Pandey, and Husk Power Systems was born. The Indian engineers, both 31, had initially planned on raising money to build small generators for simply a few villages. But the company now has a proprietary generator that runs on a methane-like gas released by heating rice husks a certain way. A waste product of rice milling, husks are plentiful in villages. While agricultural waste is common for generating heat, it is not often used for generating electricity, and there is nothing remotely like this system in the villages of developing countries. A byproduct is silica, a valuable ingredient in making cement.

I have always believed that there will not be a single source of Alternative Power in the future. Yes, I am saying that solar or hydrogen power will not be the primary source of power in the future. The future energy sources are as scattered and diverse as the landscape of our countries itself. Just like this case the raw material for the power generation is available at the source itself. Be it Bio Gas from cow dung, Solar energy in the deserts or ocean currents in countries with vast shorelines. And that is where the venture capitalists are going to look at, as well as that is where the money and innovation is going to peak.

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