Pearson Pally is a remote village in West Bengal, near the town of Shantiniketan. Like many other hamlets, power crisis has always been a major issue here. Was, being the key word here, all thanks to a group of UK and Indian researchers.
The collaborative project, named BioCPV, between University of Sheffield and its Indian partners was successful in providing the village with sustainable energy supply. The system uses food and plant waste, and solar technology to provide electricity to the villagers, street and communal lighting, and power to a medical centre and school.
The standalone power system is designed exclusively for rural areas where the main resources are solar energy and biomass. “This type of system could help to electrify rural areas of India where grid extension is infeasible or uneconomical, in order to improve the quality of life and prospects of the poorest groups of the population,” says Dr Mark Walker, Research Associate at the university’s Energy 2050 Research Institute. The project that began in 2013 took almost two years to complete.
Dr Walker says that the project is designed keeping India’s power crisis in mind. “More than 400 million people in India currently have little or no electricity. The villagers in this part of the world are employed to clear local lakes and woodlands of weeds and other plant material.
This, along with locally collected food waste, is perfect raw material for anaerobic digestion. This could improve the quality of life for women who often have to cook with dirty smoking fuel in enclosed houses,” says Dr Walker. Pearson Pally was chosen to implement this project due to its proximity to Visva-Bharati University.
Currently, Dr Walker and his team are exploring ways to use this system to provide energy to a wider population. “We are not just walking away from this project once the plant is installed. We will be monitoring it remotely to see how it performs and using this information to improve the design for future use in other communities.
The technology we are developing could lead to improvements in the provision of low-carbon electricity in developing countries, which in turn could alleviate poverty and increase healthcare, educational and employment prospects,” he says.