(Chronicle Note: This is a remarkable achievement by our alumni. Manoj Sinha and Gyanesh Pandey, along with other team members Chip Ransler and Ratnesh Kumar. Manoj Kumar and Chip Ransler are currently studying in MBA Program at
Powering Villages from Rice Husks Wins Business Plan Competition
May 6, 2008 — Two students from the
This weekend, the duo received $50,000 and a big vote of confidence in their business plan when they won the Social Innovation Competition at the
This technology provides off-grid power to rural Indian villages of 200 to 500 households. Using the husk-powered mini power plant, the team plans to offset close to 200 tons of carbon emissions per village, per year in
The competition's audience handed Husk Power Systems an additional $1,000 in the vote for the People's Choice award. Selecting from a competitive field of exceptional ideas, the competition judges, which included
"The final pitch to the judges had all the drama and emotion of a night on 'American Idol' — but with a much loftier mission," said Peter Frumkin, director of the
The $50,000 award was the latest in a string of accolades that Ransler and Sinha have received for their Husk Power plans. On April 7, they picked up a $10,000 check for winning Darden's annual business plan competition. Also in April, they were selected as one of 10 finalist teams among 245 entries from 23 countries in the Global Social Venture Competition hosted by the
The idea for the rice husk generators was originally conceived by Sinha, who earned his engineering degree from the University of Massachusetts and holds 10 patents for work done at Intel, and Gyanesh Pandey, the third leader of Husk Power, who left an engineering career in Los Angeles to return to India and oversee the rice husk project on the ground there.
Sinha and Pandey went to college together in
Then, at Darden, Sinha shared the idea with Ransler, who did a bit of research and soon suggested that the generators could be a financially viable business that could be expanded to hundreds of villages. There are 480 million Indians with no power and 350 million of them live in rural villages, concentrated in eastern
After more research and some helpful feedback from several of the business plan competitions, said Ransler, the team realized that, with more engineering, the ash produced by burning the rice husks could be easily converted into a valuable ingredient for cement production.
On top of that, additional research revealed that the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, had established a trading program for carbon emission reductions that should enable the rice husk generators to be paid for reducing carbon emissions.
The team was struck, said Ransler, by how "these big things all work together" — three sources of revenue could be produced from what was otherwise a waste product sitting in huge piles slowly rotting in villages across India. Even with conservative electricity consumption, revenue from the three sources would allow each rice husk generator to break even in about two and a half years, and it would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 200 tons per year, per village. Furthermore, explained Ransler, a lack of reliable electricity is one of the biggest obstacles to small business growth in rural
But actually getting the electricity from the power plant to the various destinations — village houses, irrigation pumps, water purification units, small businesses, etc. — presented further challenges, said Ransler. Previous electrification projects in India have generally provided villages with intermittent power — often only an hour a day — coming from distant power plants (usually coal-powered), and traveling over miles of wires to reach small villages where average personal incomes are less than $20 a month.
In many cases villagers used the many hours of downtime without power to illegally tap into the main power lines for "free" electricity. Sometimes large sections of power lines were cut down and sold as scrap metal.
Husk Power has developed several strategies to combat such problems, explained Ransler. They will require pre-payment for all electricity, and they will spend more to wire the village using double-insulated wire that is more difficult to illegally tap into than standard wire. Since electrical meters cost $10 to $15 each, and an average household will consume only about $15 to $18 of electricity per year, Husk Power will instead use a $1 circuit breaker to distribute electricity to a branch line serving four or five households. A Husk Power employee in the village will conduct a basic energy audit to determine how much electrical load the branch of houses will need and will install a circuit breaker that allows only that much current to reach the houses. Any illegal tap or other excessive consumption will trip the circuit breaker, cutting off power to all four or five houses, giving the community an incentive to work together to prevent excess consumption.
With all the refinements, the business plan soon started "looking like Starbucks — you can put one of these in 125,000 locations, hire local people, and turn a raw material into money — just substitute rice husks for coffee beans," said Ransler.
What about the original motive of providing a social good to rural
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http://www.darden.edu/html/default.aspx
3) Student grudge match-Lighting rural
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fsb/0804/gallery.rice_b_plan_competition_08.fsb/20.html
