After earning an undergraduate degree in electronics engineering at one of India’s Institute for Advanced Technology schools, Sinha received a master’s degree in electric and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He then went to work at several electronics companies making microprocessor chips. One of those companies was Intel Corp. where he currently holds 10 patents.
While attending Umass Amherst, Sinha rekindled a friendship with Gyanesh Pandey, whom he had known since 1995, as both grew up in Bihar. After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering, Pandey moved to Los Angeles to pursue a job. The two kept in touch and eventually came to the conclusion that they needed to devise a way to deliver affordable electricity to impoverished villages in India that desperately need it. “Our relatives still don’t have electricity there,” Sinha says. “We started talking about how we can give back to the community where we grew up since we clearly knew that there is a tremendous need because most of the people there are extremely poor.”
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Because they understood the situation in poor Indian communities, the first ideas that came to mind involved solar and wind power. Both technologies could easily convert the husks from the 100 million tons of rice harvested each year into a producer gas. That gas could eventually be turned into clean, readily available electricity for rural villagers. In 2006, during the heat of their brainstorming, Pandey left the United States and went back to India where he spent nine months researching technologies that would best suit that country. In the meantime, Sinha stayed in the United States.
Although the solar and wind technologies sounded good at the time, the two eventually decided on a different approach. In the spring of 2007, Sinha and Pandey began collaborating with several gasification manufacturing companies and even talked to an Indian diesel generator maker about tweaking their generators so that they could run on producer gas, or syngas. Sinha says they decided to refine the generator concept and raise money to donate rice husk generators to two or three villages near where they grew up.
In the summer of 2007, using their own money, they installed two “mini power plants” in Bihar to provide 35 to 50 kilowatts of off-grid power. The electricity was offered to villagers as a pay-for-use service. Each unit can process about 110 pounds of rice husks per hour and supply electricity to about 300 to 500 rural Indian households. The generators would operate eight to 10 hours per day. The generators would also offset about 200 tons of carbon emissions per village, per year in India.
“The reason we started looking at rice and rice husks was because the villages within the Bihar area have an abundance of rice production, growing about 500 tons per annum,” Sinha says. About 5 percent of the rice husks are burned for cooking purposes and the rest is just burned or left in the field to rot, he says.
A Foundation for Expansion
In September 2007, Sinha attended the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia to pursue a master’s degree in business. While there, he met Charles “Chip” Ransler. Sinha, Ransler and Pandey formed Husk Power Systems to provide power to some 350 million rural villages in eastern India’s “Rice Belt” where the villagers are “rice rich and power poor”, according to Sinha.
“The way [Pandey] and I were thinking about it initially, was just to do maybe two or three [processor units] with the money we made in the U.S. and give back to our community [in India] and be happy with it,” Sinha says. “But, when I went to school at Darden I talked to Chip and then we figured out that it actually could be initiated as a business; as it can be profitable and it can be expanded.”
India has been particularly fertile ground for experimentation with renewable energy initiatives. The latest edition of Ernst & Young’s renewable energy country attractiveness indices ranks India as the third most attractive market for renewable energy investment. “India’s rise to third overall … has been precipitated by excellent national and regional government support for both foreign and local investment in renewable technologies. Consequently, rapid growth is expected to continue in this market,” the report states.
The report further notes that “installed renewables capacity in India—currently standing at 8GW (gigawatts)—is now expected to double every five years, and is forecast to reach 20 gigawatts by 2012, twice the government’s target.”
India is the world’s sixth-largest energy consumer, using about 3 percent of the world’s total energy per year. With a population of more than 1 billion people, it is the second most populous country in the world behind China.
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