Husk Power raises funds to bring power to rural India

Ucilia Wang — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:08:16 +0000

The future of energy in developing countries, where there is no power grid, will be distributed and local. A startup called Husk Power Systems, which has created micro power plants that burn agricultural waste in projects around India, just raised $5 million in equity to continue to expand its reach.

The company designs plants that are small — 25 KW to 100 KW in size — that can burn agricultural waste such as rice husks and produce electricity. Husk had installed about 80 such power stations in India’s northeastern state of Bihar, when we caught up with the company in the summer of 2011.

The new funding will help the company carry out some big expansion plans. Founded in 2007, Husk Power’s co-founder Manoj Sinha told us previously he wanted to build over 2,000 mini power plants by 2014. That many power plants would light up 1 million homes and replace many kerosene lamps and avoid their carbon monoxide emissions. Scaling up the operation also will be important for the company to deliver returns to its investors.

Engineering power stations that are simple to operate and repair is key to Husk Power’s strategy. Those stations are run by local residents, who aren’t likely to have the engineering backgrounds to fix complex machines. The company also installs the distribution lines for delivering the electricity to homes.

Husk Power is choosing biomass as a fuel because of its availability in farming communities. But while biomass power plants are considered “green” because of their use of farm wastes instead of fossil fuels, they are still combusting the fuel much like how a standard power plant burns coal or gas. That means biomass power stations still emit emissions that aren’t so good for the environment and human health.

Environmental trade-offs are thorny issues to grapple with and not just for rural electrification projects. Even in developed countries, such as the U.S., the building of massive solar power plants and the need by some to use lots of water for power generation and to rely on new transmission lines to bring power to cities are pitting environmental groups against developers and regulators.

Raising private money for social entrepreneurial enterprises can’t be easy — they probably don’t generate the kind of returns that are expected by venture capitalists. Husk’s investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson as well as the Shell Foundation and Acumen Fund (which was set up with seed money from the Rockefeller Foundation, Cicso Systems Foundation and three philanthropists).

But there will be no shortage of attempts to bring renewable energy to rural areas. Earlier this month, I caught a presentation by the San Francisco startup Rural Electrification with Renewable Energy (REwiRE) at the Cleantech Open’s western regional competition, and the company wants to raise money to build mini hydropower stations in rural Indonesia.

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Husk Power lights rural India

Kate Greene — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 07:00:55 +0000

It’s rare to find electric lights along the Indian countryside. But a startup called Husk Power Systems is trying to change that. The company has developed biomass miniplants — pared-down power plants that convert oft-discarded rice husks and grasses into electricity — providing power and jobs to the people of rural India.

The power stations are small, typically only producing about 40 kilowatts of power. But that’s enough electricity to illuminate about 500 homes (three to four adjacent villages) per plant, says Manoj Sinha, Husk Power’s co-founder. This means that villagers can trade out their kerosene lamps, with their flames and carbon monoxide emissions, for light bulbs. In addition, plant operations are kept local: the company employs about 300 workers throughout the northeastern Indian state of Bihar to run the power stations.

Old idea new innovation

While many energy startups focus on perfecting new technology, Husk Power Systems has taken a different approach, says Sinha. The technology is called biomass gasification, and has been used since World War II. But specifically converting rice husks to electricity posed a problem. The husks have a very high tar content, which means that they clog engines.

Sinha and his co-founder Gyanesh Pandey realized, however, that they could solve the clogging problem by having part of the plant operators’ workflow ensure that the engine was always clean. This meant that operations would need to be mostly manual, with few of the technological bells and whistles common in other gasification systems.

One of the ways Husk Power Systems’ miniplants are more simple than a traditional power plant is they don’t use complex feedback loops, explains Sinha. Gas needs to be maintained at a certain pressure and temperature. To do this, more complex gassifiers rely on feedback systems that automatically adjust pressure and temperature.

While these feedback loops work well most of the time, they can be tricky to fix on the occasion they don’t, says Sinha . Especially if the plant operator is a villager who doesn’t have an engineering degree. Therefore, Husk Power Systems designed the plants to be manually operated and monitored without complex feedback loops, so when a problem arises, the operator can see exactly what it is and know what to fix.

Distributed power

Simplification was one of the key business innovations for the company. The other was realizing that by spreading out its small power plants, Husk Power Systems could reach more people than if it built a few larger plants. “It’s a combination of making it much more simple than a typical power plant combined with the decentralized way of power generation and distribution,” Sinha says.

The company is funded by Acumen Funds, the Shell Foundation, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, among others. And earlier this summer, it won this year’s International Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy.

Even so, the company’s approach isn’t without its detractors. Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford would prefer that all new energy be solar, wind, or an other emission-free process. “Biomass isn’t clean,” he says. “You’re putting out air pollution because it’s still a combustion process.”

Moreover, he says, while the electricity produced by Husk Power Systems is enough to light homes, it’s not enough to offer an alternative to stoves that also burn wood and dried dung cakes (which are made partially of use rice husks).

Sinha explains that his company chose biomass over other power sources including solar and wind because, “those technologies aren’t simple to install.” And while solar power is simple to run, he says, it can be expensive to fix if something goes wrong. “We made things simpler by choosing to go mechanical,” he says.

He adds that Husk Power Systems has no plans to replace fuel-burning stoves with electric ones, but is open to partnerships that could enable this.

Since August of 2007, Husk Power Systems has installed about 80 plants throughout Bihar. The company plans to expand dramatically over the next few years, growing to 500 plants by 2012 and 2,014 plants by 2014. That many plants could employ 7000 locals and light 1 million homes.

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Husk Power raises funds to bring power to rural India

Husk Power lights rural India