With policy focus, creative use of technology, and good management, minigrids can deliver 100 percent electrification for the ~1.5 billion mostly rural people worldwide — affordably, without global warming emissions, and within ten years. In urban deployments,...
Could the Amul milk cooperative success serve as a model for solar-based electricity in rural India? The "white" revolution can extend to the "light" revolution for 400 million Indians without electricity and burn kerosene for cooking and illumination....
Suddenly, electricity appears too important to be managed by traditional electric utilities alone. The barriers to entry have fallen; a large number of new and old companies have entered the power generation business. How should the existing utilities...
India's recent electric grid failure on July 30 and 31 has been determined the world's largest blackout. This event will no doubt spur some movement toward efficiency and discipline. India requires new and innovative thinking and effectiveness through...
I doubt that electricity is fundamentally a wide-area networking service. At first glance, this statement appears absurd. Like telephony or the Internet, electricity enters our homes through outside wires. Is it not therefore a networking service?
Renewable Energy (RE) will likely enter business schools under the banner of sustainability. Good though this is, managing energy in all forms increasingly belongs in business strategy – not in technology studies, environmental sciences, or public policy...
In my previous article in REW on the innovation imperative, I argued that ICT companies are well positioned to be next generation electric utilities, especially in the renewable energy space, should they show leadership and vision. This is due to an increase...
Dag Hammarskjold's quote, "Not to encumber the earth. No pathetic 'Excelsior!' but just this: not to encumber the earth," may well serve as the motto of the growing sustainability movement. Yet how can economic development occur without energy, and primarily...
President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was conferred in anticipation of the future good he would do more than for deeds he had already accomplished. Can there not be a Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry prospectively announced for scientists who achieve...
I scanned the curriculum of prominent business schools to see how many address topics in renewable energy and the subject is absent in nearly all of them. This holds back the advancement of the industry, and deprives MBA candidates of access to information...