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Grameen Shakti is the sister company of Grameen which has a long term
goal of being a sustainable social business in the area of renewable
energy. Their main project is to bring solar panels to rural villages
that are not part of the normal electric grid. These solar panels are
expensive as while there are local markets for the rest of the
equipment, the solar panels themselves have to be imported from Japan.
This is only exacerbated by the rising cost of all alternative energy
sources from the increase pressure of skyrocketing oil prices. The
cheapest of these systems runs close to 20,000 taka (US $290), including
installation and lights specialized to run off of DC current. They have
a three year installment plan for customers to try and ease the pain of
the price, but no matter how it is cut 20,000 taka is a lot of money for
the average Bangladeshi. Currently around half of Bangladeshis live
below the international poverty line of two dollars a day. Nevertheless
Grameen Shakti stands as the largest supplier of solar panels to
Bangladesh, responsible for two thirds of the solar panels in
Bangladesh. They have installed over 300,000 systems, and installing
close to 7000 additional solar panels in a month.
Nevertheless, the unavoidable but exorbitant price of the solar panels
has kept them from being a truly sustainable business. They are making a
slim profit, but only due to a 20% subsidy from the government (Which is
due to a World Bank loan to stimulate renewable energy in Bangladesh).
As such, they are currently more styled as a non-profit/NGO style of
organization, but they have the goal of becoming a true self-sufficient
social business that requires no subsidy from the government. They are
soon going to be helped by an additional subsidy from the World Bank
that will give them $9 for every ton of carbon emissions they help
reduce. The exact mechanism for this carbon reduction subsidy is still
unclear to me, considering that for the majority of their customers this
is the first and only opportunity for electricity and not a substitute
for a carbon releasing production.
On a later day, a group of us visited one of the branch offices of
Grameen Shakti. They took us to see some of their customers. One of the
members was using his light to be able to keep his corner drugstore open
after things got dark. Another used his to power a television and small
speakers to attract more customers to his roadside cafe. While Grameen
Shakti explained to us that some of their customers use their systems to
increase their business, or pay off their system by selling the
additional electricity to close-by stores, I found out later that a
majority of their solar panel customers are actually use them in their
homes and not at a place of commerce. There they give the increased
benefits to children’s studies, as well as providing electricity for one
of the main motivators for all civilized life: namely, television.
In addition to the solar panels, Grameen Shakti provides biogas systems.
Again, the prices are unavoidably high, and they have a three year
installment plan to try and compensate. I find the biogas to be a more
exciting and applicable technology. The alchemists of old spend years
trying to make lead turn into gold. Obviously their knowledge of
monetary policy was quite limited. Turning all of the lead into gold
would simply make gold worthless and lead valuable. Still there is
something alluring in turning something that is common and useless into
something that is valuable. These biogas plants do exactly that. Simply
mix equal parts water and cow manure, drop it in through the inlet pipe
and out comes methane to run cook stoves and rich fertilizer for the
fields. I saw the smallest sized plant in the field which produced
enough methane for a single family to use for cooking and ran off the
excrement of their three cows. Larger sized plants offer the possibility
to pay for themselves by selling the extra gas to surrounding neighbors.
Recently, Grameen Shakti has started an improved cooking stove (ICS)
project. These stoves are aiming to replace the normal concrete indoor
wood burning cooking stoves. While commercial ones can be custom build
to larger sizes, the standard domestic ICS has room to heat two pots and
costs 700 taka (US $10). The benefits include a chimney to eliminate the
indoor air pollution of the normal cook stoves thus improving the health
of the women and children; increased fuel efficiency; and the ability to
cook two pots at the same time. It seems that the numbers of ICS is
currently small – the branch we later visited only had 27 ICS compared
to 700 or so solar panels – it has only recently been introduced and so
they are expecting an increase later.
Even though I have my doubts of Grameen Shakti being able to stand on
its own anytime in the near future, it is encouraging to me that it
exists and also has been successful in securing the additional funding
it needs to operate. The additional resources currently being spent on
alternative energies and increases in solar panel efficiency will likely
lead to a point where Grameen Shakti will eventually be able to be self
sustaining. When that time comes, Grameen Shakti will already have the
infrastructure in place to expand rapidly across Bangladesh, and can
serve as a model for other countries looking to start a renewable energy
social business. I hope that Grameen Shakti will continue to be able to
secure additional funding until such a time as the research catches up
with their vision.
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