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

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.