Community Level Power

Overview: Electric power and lighting for entire communities, as opposed to individual households or customers.

Generally delivered by installing central renewable power sources that are either connected to homes through wiring systems (mini-grids) or charge batteries that customers take home.
Central generation plants (range 35-120kW), are most often biomass powered (AVANI, DESI Power, Husk Power Systems), but sometimes use other sources such as hydro (Practical Action Peru), or smaller (1kW)wind/solar (blueEnergy).
Some social enterprises train communities to maintain systems collectively, but install power through stand-alone solar panels in individual houses (Light Up The World), or use rechargeable lanterns owned by a village committee (Sunlabob).
Central generation systems are usually unaffordable for communities ($10-15,000 for a blueEnergy wind turbine, $200,000 for a DESI Power plant installation). These systems are generally funded by donor subsidies or revenue from selling the power the generator produces.

 

1. Delivering power at the community level is much more complex than delivering at an individual or household level.

• Community-level systems require proper incentive structures for maintenance (since no individual owns the system, sometimes no one takes responsibility for upkeep).
  • Sunlabob creates a village committee which owns all lanterns and looks after the charging station.
• Community-level systems are generally more complex to run than smaller-scale systems, and require extensive community training or village-based staff.

 

2. Community-level systems (esp. biomass plants) are large enough to bring the cost per kilowatt much lower than most smaller-scale systems.

3. Non-subsidized models require enough revenue to run a large, expensive system profitably. Often, village populations do not use enough power to cover costs (many only need lighting 3 hours per day), and installing systems for broad geographies is complex and can overextend enterprises.