During the recent historic blackout in India, a rural village in India kept the lights on thanks to a simple solar power microgrid installed by Berkeley graduates. Residents have already gotten used to the power and want even more.
September 10th 2012 - At the end of July, India experienced the worst blackout in modern history. At least 20 states lost power in three huge grid failures covering an area home to more than 700 million people.
In one tiny village in very rural Rajasthan, the lights stayed on. Buttermilk machines churned, televisions blared and fans whirred, providing respite from the drenching humidity of the post-monsoon heat.
"We were sitting in the dark in our head office in Jaipur waiting for the power to come back on and yet in Khareda, where very recently they had no power at all, there was an unbroken supply of electricity," said Yashraj Khaitan, one of two 22-year-olds who made it happen.
Khaitan, who is Indian, with Jacob Dickinson, who was born in San Diego, has a big plan: to bring cheap, sustainable electricity to at least one million Indians within five years through their start-up, Gram Power.
Three months ago the engineering graduates from the University of California, Berkeley, chose the hamlet of Khareda Lakshmipura to test a simple solar-power microgrid which has the potential to change the lives of many of the 400 million or so Indians who are not connected to the national grid – not to mention the hundreds of millions of others in the world's biggest democracy whose electricity supply is erratic at best. read more>>>
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