Who is EAI ?

  Imagine you are a nobody like me. Now imagine that you are sitting right behind Ratan Tata. Yes, THE Tata. He is sitting right in front of you for not just a few flickering minutes, but for 3 full hours. For a change, he is not in high level consultations with top honchos. In...

Yet again, we have heard about the government's seriousness about RPO (renewable purchase obligation). The only difference is that, this time it is by the NDA government. Now, why would we take this any more seriously than all of the earlier attempts? Optimists point to the following: 1. To enforce RPO,...

EAI has launched Suncyclopedia, the Solar Encyclopedia  . This is a unique web resource that introduces solar energy in a simple and easy-to-understand manner to all those who wish to understand solar better. While there are a number of web resources available that explain solar energy, most of these are...

An interesting news report in The Hindu on a Kenyan effort to manage human waste, "Turning Human Waste into Clean Energy", got me down recent memory lane. Two years back, my team had helped out the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in their efforts on finding solutions to fecal waste in India. Putting jargons aside,...

Colleges (and to a certain extent schools) are likely to be some of the earliest adopters of solar power from their premises. There are three reasons for this: 1. Most colleges are running during the same hours as the sun is up and running. Thus, the need for storage (batteries) is reduced...

Schools are great places for solar. Not only do they provide many schools a nice, alternative way to generate power. Most schools have that ideallic streak in them - what better time to teach folks to be idealistic than when they are, well, not yet folks. Indian schools are just warming to...

In our Rooftop Solar series, I look at some interesting rooftop solar installations in hotels around the world. To make it easy on your eyes, I have provided as many pictures as possible, with links to the original news articles. Hope you like these. The 1.6 MW rooftop array at...

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to meet up with some interesting engineers at IIT Mumbai. But these engineers were entrepreneurs too, and they have set up a bio-energy technology company named Urjas Gasifiers. Urjas, based out of the business incubation cell at IIT Mumbai, specialises in biomass gasifiers....

For those of us glued to the solar radar, most of what we see and hear today are news about solar PV. As if solar thermal simply did not exist. Or matter. And if at all we hear anything on the thermal side, it is about how large scale solar...

From almost nothing in 2010, the Indian solar sector has come a long way, with total installed capacities well above 2500 MW by end of Jul 2014. Sure, that’s a blip on the global solar radar screen that is clocking 150+ GW (1,50,000 MW), but that also shows the kind...