Vijay Kumar Das, a line engineer with Dharnai’s electricity committee, compared the village’s solar microgrid experiment to polluted groundwater. Much of that power would go into the central grid, rather than being disseminated through small, decentralized energy systems. The challenge is coming into focus as Prime Minister Narendra Modi moves forward on an ambitious pledge to generate 175 gigawatts from utility-scale solar and wind energy by 2022 and increase coal-powered generation. By “fake,” they meant solar.Īnalysts say the story of Dharnai illustrates how difficult it can be to provide reliable, high-quality electricity to the world’s poor without using the central grid. When the former chief minister of Bihar state visited to inaugurate the grid, villagers lined up to protest, chanting, “We want real electricity, not fake electricity!”īy “real,” they meant power from the central grid, generated mostly using coal. But, residents said, the problems started almost immediately.

So when activists with Greenpeace set up a solar-powered microgrid in July of 2014, the excitement was palpable.

Today, it is powered by coal.ĭharnai, a community of about 3,200 people in eastern India’s Bihar state, had been without electricity for three decades. DHARNAI, India-One year ago, environmentalists hailed this tiny village as the future of clean energy in rural India.

Vijay tv serial promo 19.10.2015