This College Team Built a Clean-Energy System That Can Light up 4 Rural Homes at Once |
It was 2019, and election duty had taken Prof Arnab Ghosh to a remote village near Sundargarh in Odisha. Evening settled in, but the homes around him stayed dim. Inside one small house, a child bent over a notebook, trying to study under the weak light of a torch. The fan stood still. The air felt heavy and warm as the last bit of daylight faded.
For many in that village, evenings like this were routine. Electricity arrived without consistency. On some days, the power disappeared for hours. Families planned their cooking, children timed their homework, and shopkeepers managed their work around the uncertainty of when electricity might return.
Across many parts of rural India, this story is familiar. Electricity often feels like an unpredictable event rather than a reliable part of daily life. Diesel generators become the backup option. They help run essential appliances but come with high fuel costs, unpredictable maintenance, and harmful emissions.
Solar and wind energy offer cleaner alternatives. Yet they cannot always provide stable power on their own. Clouds can reduce solar output, and wind can slow without warning. When that happens, power becomes fragile again.
This makes the real challenge clear. Clean energy needs to be managed in a way that keeps electricity stable, reliable, and available at all times.
That evening in Sundargarh stayed with Prof Arnab. It became the starting point for a research journey that would unfold over the next few years.
“We come from Sundargarh district in Odisha, a largely tribal region where many families come from underprivileged backgrounds. In several remote, hilly, and forested regions, extending conventional grid connections is often not feasible. Seeing these realities firsthand motivated us to design a multi-renewable integrated system that can generate electricity locally and reliably,” Arnab, who teaches at NIT Rourkela, tells The Better India.
“Our aim is simple: to ensure that clean power can run basic domestic appliances and improve everyday life. This work is deeply rooted in societal needs, and we believe it can........