Renewable Energy Technologies
Energy is essential for sustainable human development.
Energy, although not an end in itself, remains an essential tool to facilitate
socio-economic activities and promote human empowerment. Thus, the rampant
unavailability of energy sources and services correlates closely with many
challenges of sustainable development, such as poverty alleviation, the
advancement of women, protection of the environment, and perhaps most
importantly - the creation of sustainable livelihoods.
Emphasis on institution-building and enhanced policy
dialogue is necessary to create the social, economic, and politically enabling
conditions for a transition to a more sustainable future.
Most of the people who do not have access to modern energy
services live in poverty. Although low energy consumption by itself is not the
reason for poverty, the lack of energy services correlates closely with most
indicators of poverty.
Energy is crucially important to satisfy basic nutrition and
health needs, and energy services constitute a sizable share of total household
expenditure among the poorest households in developing countries. In order to
improve the standard of living of especially the rural people, we need to
enhance the efficiency of commercial and non-commercial energy sources, and
also to shift to higher quality energy carriers, in both the short term and the
long term.
ARTS Renewable Energy Center
ARTS_EnergyCenter.pdf
Renewable energy systems use resources that occur naturally,
are constantly replaced and are usually less polluting. Examples of renewable
energy systems include bio-mass, solar, wind, and geothermal energy, as well
trees and plants, rivers, and even garbage.
Renewable energy encompasses many technologies at different
stages of development and commercialization, from the burning of wood for heat
in the residential sector (traditional and low-technology) to wind-generated
electricity (widespread and technically proven) to processes such as biomass
gasification for electricity generation (also proven technically).
One day, all our home's energy may come from the sun or the
wind.
The ARTS REC provides the targeted rural community with all
their information needs and models for understanding the various options for
using renewable energy.
Solar Powered Community Centers
ARTS "Solar Powered Community Centers" (SPCCs) are
based on the principle that people everywhere have the same basic needs: for
food, shelter, caring for their children and families, building their future,
leading a life of learning, creativity and dignity. This principle is enshrined
in the Sankalp Pyramid Model Paradigm for sustainable rural development.
Since the rural people in the targeted communities do not
enjoy adequate levels of socio-economic and political conditions to support
these basic needs, the SPCCs will provide the critical startup resources and
assistance to enable these rural communities to continuously develop the tools
that will then enable the community to grow by themselves and ultimately
implement sustainable livelihood strategies in their own, socially accepted
ways.
The ARTS SPCCs model focusses on a self-contained, commercial-grade
photovoltaic solar-powered, Internet-enabled community center, which includes a
Computer-mediated classroom with electronic projection facilities for
conducting courses out of roving laptops, a satellite dish for
telecommunications, and provides for a medical clinic with telemedicine
connections.
Sustainability is achieved by promoting the growth of local
industries and handicrafts by make it self-financing through eCommerce on the
Internet.
The ARTS website will provide the platform to create a commercial
website to market products from the villages worldwide. The people in the
village will decide for themselves how to use the income to improve their
lives. Once a rural community has reached criticality in its self development
paradigm, they need everyone else to get out of the way.
Biomass Technologies
The widespread geographic distribution of biomass sources,
combined with its potential to be converted into modern energy carriers and its
competitive costs, make it a promising option for developing countries, where the current levels of
energy services are low. Biomass accounts for about one third of all energy in
developing countries as a whole, and nearly 90 percent in some of the least
developed countries. Over 2 billion people continue to rely on biomass fuels
and traditional technologies for cooking and heating and 1.5-2 billion people
have no access to electricity.
ART Biomass strategies facilitate the design, production and
dissemination of sustainable modernised bioenergy activities, including the
technical, policy, and institutional aspects. Bioenergy is an important part of
the world's energy system, and the appropriate design, production and
dissemination of bioenergy systems will contribute significantly to sustainable
human development and people empowerment.
Because plants and trees depend on sun-light to grow,
biomass energy is a form of stored solar energy. Although wood is the largest
source of biomass energy, we also use rice husk, corn, sugarcane wastes, and
other farming byproducts.
There are three ways to use biomass.
(a) It can be burned to produce heat and electricity
(b) Changed to a gas-like fuel such as methane or ‘producer
gas’ in a gasifier, or
(c) Changed to a liquid fuel, also called biofuels, which
include two forms of alcohol: ethanol and methanol.
Modernised biomass technologies have a great potential to
provide improved rural energy services based on agricultural residues/biomass.
Widespread use of modernised biomass for cooking and combined heat and power
(CHP) generation in rural areas can address multiple social, economic and
environmental bottlenecks that now constrain local development. The
availability of low-cost biomass power in rural areas can help provide:
·
cleaner, more efficient energy services to support
local development,
·
promote environmental protection,
·
stem the use of coal as a home fuel, and
·
improve the living conditions of rural people,
especially women and children who suffer the most from air pollution associated
with indoor burning of agricultural residues.
Solar Photovoltaic Energy
Experience across the developing world confirms the
technical reliability of photovoltaic (PV) systems in a variety of settings.
Under the right conditions, solar home systems can offer lighting and other
services to large numbers of households that are poorly served by existing
energy sources or have no service at all. There is an important economic niche
for such systems within rural electrification programs. PV systems are an
effective complement to grid-based power, which is often too costly for
sparsely settled and remote areas. For such rural conditions, fuel-independent,
modular solar home systems can offer the most economical means to provide
lighting and power for small appliances.
Sankalp Refrigeration
There are several methods of cooling and refrigeration using
solar energy. At ARTS, we shall focus on the following two renewable energy technologies:
a.) Biomass Gasifier Based Refrigeration Systems
Cold storage application at the site of harvest would
immensely benefit the quality and marketability of fruits and vegetables.
Comparative performance studies of biomass gasifier based direct fired vapour
absorption cooling systems and Biomass gasifier operated DG set coupled
conventional vapour compression cooling systems have been made at Anna
University, Chennai, which show that the biomass based direct fired cold
storage systems can be operated at lower cost per TR compared to other modes of
operation.
b.) Pot-in-Pot Refrigeration Systems
The basic motivation for the ‘Pot-in-Pot’ (PiP) vegetable
cooler project is the lack of electricity in rural communities, for there can
be no refrigeration presently without electricity. Even in urban and semi-urban
areas, the power supply is erratic. And in any case, many rural and even the urban
poor cannot afford to buy refrigerators.
The impact of the ‘Pot-in-Pot’ vegetable cooler is perhaps
greatest for women and girls, since they can then sell vegetable produce and
food from their homes and overcome their age-old dependency on their husbands
as the sole providers. The device will liberate girls from having to sell food
on a ‘distress selling’ basis, or to make repeated visits to the markets for
their daily purchases. Instead, they will be free to attend schools or pursue
any activity of their choice.
Farmers will be able to sell on demand rather than 'rush
sell' because of spoilage, and community income levels should rise noticeably.
This will help to stem disease and ultimately contribute to slow the pace of
the rural exodus to cities.
White Papers
An important activity of ARTS is to continually generate
information products and services to promote the cause of ‘Sustainable
Development’ in general, and for rural development in particular. These will be
available in the form of ‘White Papers’, which will be posted and revised
appropriately.