Rural microgrids – ‘Tragedy of commons’ or ‘community collective action’

ABSTRACT

Providing universal electricity access is India’s national priority and part of its global commitment to sustainable development. India has an increasing urban-rural gap in electricity consumption. Microgrids can evolve as a viable solution, especially for last-mile connectivity in rural areas. Through a field survey, this paper evaluates the functioning and governance of solar microgrid projects in eight villages of Komna Block in the eastern province of India. These projects were hailed for their holistic implementation with a significant portion of the budget invested in governance aspects. However, the field survey showed that most of these projects were dysfunctional and had suffered from the ‘tragedy of commons’, where people over-exploit a common resource leading to its collapse. One of the projects, which was functional, reflected ‘community collective action’, where people cooperate to manage the system. An analysis of these projects revealed that, for the sustainability of microgrids, it is imperative to acknowledge energy aspirations of rural households, to develop the capacity of the local youth for microgrid maintenance, to have a governance based on the common-pool resource theory, and to have complementarity with the main grid. The study also examined the inconsistencies in the definition of microgrids and proposed a forward-looking definition for the global south.

KEYWORDS:

• Microgrid definition
• rural electrification
• solar PV
• Common-Pool Resource (CPR)
• India
• sustainable development goals

Acknowledgements

Dr. Hippu Salk Kristle Nathan thanks and acknowledges the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE) for the support to carry out the field study under the project ‘Remote village electrification in India through solar home system - assessment and options’ (Research Project Grant No. SANDEE / 2013-01). He has benefited from insightful discussions with Dilip Ahuja, E. Somanathan, A.K. Enamul Haq, Mani Nepal, Priya Shyamsundar, and from the presentations made at BEC, Bagalkot, IISc, Bangalore, IIT, Madras, NIE, Mysore, and Research & Training workshops of SANDEE. He also acknowledges the administrative support from SANDEE provided by Malvika Joshi, Anuradha Kafle, and Neesha Pradhan. Soumya Deep Das is a PhD student at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal and at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. His PhD is part of a larger research project implemented by NIAS Bengaluru on the theme entitled ‘to understand the Interaction between components of Earth and Human Systems at various Spatial and Temporal Scales’ having funding support from the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Government of India (MoES/ 16/15/2011-RDEAS (NIAS) dated May 22, 2018). All the three authors of this article are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and editor(s) of the journal for their suggestions which helped to improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 World Bank (2021) shows India ranks at 108 rank among 142 countries for which data could be available.

2 For evolution, characteristics, and classification of microgrid, see Hossain et al. (2019), ADB (2020), among others.

3 kVA and kW are related through power factor which is 0.98 for solar. Hence, 100 kVA = 98 kW (CEA, 2013).

4 Mini-grid under 5 kW is called a nano-grid and under 1kW is called a pico-grid (IRENA, 2015). The term microgrid and mini-grid are used interchangeably by various agencies and in literature (ADB, 2020; Hirsch et al., 2018).

5 Islanding is a condition in which the microgrid continues to provide power without the main grid (ADB, 2020).

6 This microgrid is of different kind as it can operate riding-through between the two modes (Katiraei & Iravani, 2006).

7 This programme has been renamed to ‘Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana’ in 2014 (REC, 2021)

8 Remote villages are not only un-electrified, but also, un-electrifiable, hence not covered under RGGVY (Iyer et al., 2010; MNRE, 2004). RVE used the term ‘off-grid’ instead of ‘microgrid’ and the options for the energy sources included solar, mini-hydel, biomass, and wind. (MNRE, 2004).

9 More than 95% of the cases solar home lighting systems were distributed (CSE, 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hippu Salk Kristle Nathan

Hippu Salk Kristle Nathan is an engineer-turned development researcher with an M Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and Ph.D. from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai. He has won the Elsevier-National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI-Scopus) Young Scientist Award 2017 in Social Sciences. He was the Subir Chowdhury Post-doctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics for 2016–2017. Currently, as Associate Professor at IRMA, he teaches and researches on topics in the areas of development, energy, sustainability, and disarmament. Prior to IRMA he was working with NIAS, Bangalore. He can be reached at [email protected] or at [email protected].

Soumya Deep Das

Soumya Deep Das is a research scholar currently pursuing his Ph.D. dissertation entitled ‘Way Forward for the Viability of Power Distribution Sector in India – A Case study in Karnataka’. He is thankful to MAHE and NIAS for allowing him to carry out his Ph.D. research. His research interests lie in the interface of Power Sector Policy and Sustainable Development Goals. He can be reached at [email protected] or at [email protected].

Anantha Padmanabhan PS

Anantha Padmanabhan PS holds a Master’s Degree in Physics from Christ University, Bengaluru. He is mainly interested in multidisciplinary research in energy, environment and climate change, sustainable development, and policy. He can be reached at [email protected].