Husk Power for India




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return encodeURIComponent('University of Virginia students have created a
generator that uses rice husks, plentiful in rural Indian villages, to generate
electricity in an environmentally friendly way.');
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return encodeURIComponent('Recycling of Waste Materials,Energy and
Power,India,University of Virginia,Husk Power Systems,Manoj Sinha,Charles
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return encodeURIComponent('By ANDREW C. REVKIN');
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return encodeURIComponent('January 4, 2009');
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By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: December 24, 2008












Many of India’s cities have become bustling
centers for high technology and heavy industry, but hundreds of
millions of people in the countryside remain off the grid. Growing up
in rural Bihar State, Manoj Sinha knew what it was like to sit in the
dark. So after earning an electrical engineering degree at the University of
Massachusetts,
Amherst, and working for the Intel Corporation, he began exploring ways
to turn farm waste into electricity, with the dream of building
village-scale generators.

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Gyanesh Pandey/Husk Power Systems

Husk Power Systems’ first power plant in Bihar, India, as it was being
assembled. Its fuel is rice husks.




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Last year at the University of Virginia,
where he 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. The system produces enough electricity to supply
300 to 500 households for 8 to 10 hours a day. A byproduct is silica, a
valuable ingredient in making cement. The long-term plan is to
profit from the global market in credits — earned by avoiding
greenhouse-gas emissions, which result from burning fossil fuels like
coal — and to sell the benefit. Husk Power Systems won first
place in 2008 in the University of Virginia business plan competition
and the social innovation competition at the University of Texas, Austin. The
students are headquartered at the Darden School of Business incubator, where
they get space and advice.There
are generators in five villages now, with the hope of expanding to 100
within a few years, Mr. Ransler says. Eventually, these communities
could shift to other electricity sources as the Indian economy matures.
But Mr. Ransler, 30, predicts there will be a market for many years to
come for small-scale power systems burning renewable farm waste.Business
leaders must realize that the world’s poor need investments more than
handouts, he says, adding, “These are customers, not victims.”



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