India is the third largest producer of electricity in the world. During the fiscal year (FY) 2022–23, the total electricity generation in the country was 1,844 TWh, of which 1,618 TWh was generated by utilities.
Rural electrification is the process of bringing electrical power to rural and remote areas. Rural communities are suffering from colossal market failures as the national grids fall short of their demand for electricity. As of 2019, 770 million people live without access to electricity – 10.2% of the global population. Electrification typically begins in cities and towns and gradually extends to rural areas, however, this process often runs into obstacles in developing nations. Expanding the national grid is expensive and countries consistently lack the capital to grow their current infrastructure. Additionally, amortizing capital costs to reduce the unit cost of each hook-up is harder to do in lightly populated areas. If countries are able to overcome these obstacles and reach nationwide electrification, rural communities will be able to reap considerable amounts of economic and social development.
The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to design, fund and implement solar energy solutions to benefit those in poor rural communities without access to an electrical grid. This allows students to study at night and brings computers and Internet into schools. It makes it possible to bring in water for irrigation without having to hand-carry it long distances, allowing women to spend their time on money-earning enterprises. Access to electricity and water improves health care. SELF has completed several projects in more than 20 countries including a solar powered drip irrigation in Benin, a health care centre in Haiti, telemedicine in the Amazon rainforest, online learning platform in South Africa, and a microenterprise development in Nigeria.
Many countries and territories have installed significant solar power capacity into their electrical grids to supplement or provide an alternative to conventional energy sources. Solar power plants use one of two technologies:
Harish Hande is an Indian social entrepreneur, who co-founded SELCO India in 1995. He was awarded with the Ramon Magsaysay Award for 2011 for "his pragmatic efforts to put solar power technology in the hands of the poor, through his social enterprise SELCO India".
Solar power has a small role in electricity production in the United Kingdom.
The Grameen family of organizations has grown beyond Grameen Bank into a multi-faceted group of both commercial and non-profit ventures. It was first established by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder of Grameen Bank. Most of the organizations in the Grameen group have central offices at the Grameen Bank Complex in Mirpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank started to diversify in the late 1980s when it began attending to unutilized or underutilized fishing ponds, as well as irrigation pumps like deep tubewells. In 1989, these diversified interests started growing into separate organizations, as the fisheries project became Grameen Fisheries Foundation and the irrigation project became Grameen Krishi Foundation.
Reliance Power Limited (R-Power), formerly Reliance Energy Generation Limited (REGL) is a part of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. It was established to develop, construct, operate and maintain power projects in the Indian and international markets. Reliance Infrastructure, an Indian private sector power utility company and the Reliance ADA Group promote Reliance Power. The present CEO of Reliance Power is K. Raja Gopal since 2 May 2018.
Solar power includes solar farms as well as local distributed generation, mostly on rooftops and increasingly from community solar arrays. In 2023, utility-scale solar power generated 164.5 terawatt-hours (TWh), or 3.9% of electricity in the United States. Total solar generation that year, including estimated small-scale photovoltaic generation, was 238 TWh.
The Lemelson Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) private foundation. It was started in 1993 by Jerome H. Lemelson and his wife Dorothy. The foundation held total net assets of US$444,124,049 at the end of 2020 and US$484,432,021 at the end of 2021.
Topaz Solar Farm is a 550 megawatt (MWAC) photovoltaic power station in San Luis Obispo County, California, United States. Construction on the project began in November 2011 and ended in November 2014. It is one of the world's largest solar farms. The $2.5 billion project includes 9 million CdTe photovoltaic modules based on thin-film technology, manufactured by U.S. company First Solar. The company also built, operates and maintains the project for MidAmerican Renewables, a Berkshire Hathaway company. Pacific Gas and Electric will buy the electricity under a 25-year power purchase agreement. According to First Solar, it created about 400 construction jobs.
Solar power has been growing rapidly in the U.S. state of California because of high insolation, community support, declining solar costs, and a renewable portfolio standard which requires that 60% of California's electricity come from renewable resources by 2030, with 100% by 2045. Much of this is expected to come from solar power via photovoltaic facilities or concentrated solar power facilities.
Solar power has been growing in the U.S. state of Oregon in recent years due to new technological improvements and a variety of regulatory actions and financial incentives enacted by the state government.
PACE financing is a means used in the United States of America of financing energy efficiency upgrades, disaster resiliency improvements, water conservation measures, or renewable energy installations in existing or new construction of residential, commercial, and industrial property owners. Depending on state legislation, PACE financing can be used to finance water efficiency products, seismic retrofits, resiliency, and other measures with social benefits.
E+Co is a non-governmental organization based in Bloomfield, New Jersey, United States, that from its founding in 1994 to its restructuring in 2012 made over 250 clean energy investments in developing countries. Over these 18 years, E+Co maintained field offices in San Jose, Costa Rica, Bangkok, Thailand, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Accra, Ghana. The company's name is pronounced, "E and Co".
SoloPower was a solar energy company developing and manufacturing Copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) thin-film flexible Photo-voltaic Solar Panels. The company used a special electroplating technology to utilize nearly 100% of its materials.
The Desert Sunlight Solar Farm is a 550-megawatt (MWAC) photovoltaic power station approximately six miles north of Desert Center, California, United States, in the Mojave Desert. It uses approximately 8.8 million cadmium telluride modules made by the US thin-film manufacturer First Solar. It has the same 550 MW installed capacity as the Topaz Solar Farm in the Carrizo Plain region of Central California, making both of them tied for the second largest completed solar plants by installed capacity as of fall 2015.
The Agua Caliente Solar Project is a 290 megawatt (MWAC) photovoltaic power station, built in Yuma County, Arizona using 5.2 million cadmium telluride modules made by the U.S. thin-film manufacturer First Solar. It was the largest solar facility in the world when the project was commissioned in April 2014.
Bank of Industry Limited is Nigeria's oldest and largest Development Finance Institution (DFI) currently operating. It is owned by the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI) Nigeria (94.80%), the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) (5.19%) and private shareholders (0.01%).
Winrock International is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to increase economic opportunity, sustain natural resources, and protect the environment. Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., Winrock is named for Winthrop Rockefeller, who served as the 37th governor of Arkansas.
