STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 2 May 2012

[Demeter]

11. Farmers Foil Utilities Using Cell Phones to Access Solar

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-11/farmers-foil-utilities-using-cell-phones-to-access-solar.html

The villagers of Halliberu in southern India are on the crest of an electricity revolution. Bangalore-based Simpa Networks Inc. has been installing solar power equipment in their non-electrified houses. From the poorest parts of Africa and Asia to the most-developed regions in the U.S. and Europe, solar units and small-scale wind and biomass generators promise to extend access to power to more people than ever before....In October, Bangalore-based Simpa Networks Inc. installed a solar panel on Anand’s whitewashed adobe house along with a small metal box in his living room to monitor electricity usage. The 25-year-old rice farmer, who goes by one name, purchases energy credits to unlock the system via his mobile phone on a pay-as-you-go model. When his balance runs low, Anand pays 50 rupees ($1) -- money he would have otherwise spent on kerosene. Then he receives a text message with a code to punch into the box, giving him about another week of electric light. When he pays off the full cost of the system in about three years, it will be unlocked and he will get free power.

Before the solar panel arrived, Anand lit his home with kerosene lamps that streaked the walls with smoke and barely penetrated the darkness of the village, which lacks electrification. Twice a week, he trudged 45 minutes to a nearby town just to charge his phone. “Things are much easier now,” Anand says, describing how he used to go through 5 liters (1 gallon) of fuel a month, almost half of it bought from the black market at four times the price of government kerosene rations. “There was never enough.” Anand is on the crest of an electricity revolution that’s sweeping through power markets and threatening traditional utilities’ dominance of the world’s supply. Across India and Africa, startups and mobile phone companies are developing so-called microgrids, in which stand- alone generators power clusters of homes and businesses in places where electric utilities have never operated.

In Europe, cooperatives are building their own generators and selling power back to the national or regional grid while information technology developers and phone companies are helping consumers reduce their power consumption and pay less for the electricity they do use. The revolution is just beginning, says Jeremy Rifkin, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Third Industrial Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Disruptive to the economic status quo, the transformation opens up huge opportunities to consumers who may find themselves trading power in the future much as they swap information over the Internet today, he says.

“This is power to the people,” says Rifkin, who was once best known as a leading opponent of the Vietnam War....India has 30 gigawatts of mainly diesel generators that could be replaced by cheaper solar power tomorrow, says Tarun Kapoor, joint secretary at the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. (One gigawatt is enough energy to power about 200,000 U.S. homes.)...Within a decade, installing photovoltaic panels may be cheaper for many families than buying power from national grids in much of the world, including the U.S., Japan, Brazil and the U.K., according to data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The ultimate losers in this shifting balance of power may be established utilities. They’ve invested billions of dollars in centralized networks that are slowly being edged out of markets they’ve dominated. “Over the next decade, utilities are going to be under a lot of pressure,” says Gerard Reid, a partner and energy banker at London-based investment adviser Alexa Capital. Reid predicts that power prices will come down across Europe as new entrants that create electricity from renewable sources break up traditional utilities’ oligopoly....MORE