http://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2014/12/07/using-electric-car-batteries-to-power-schools-in-india/ Using Electric Car Batteries To Power Schools In India Anne Field 12/07/2014
Can electric cars be used to run classrooms for low-income kids in India? Let me explain. An electrical engineer and self-described motor head by the name of Siva Rajendran wants to solve a problem, and it’s a big one: In India, there’s a little boom in so-called affordable private schools (APS), which charge students as little as $5 per month and provide low-income populations with an education regarded to be of a much higher quality than what’s offered by government schools. Only, to protect its shaky energy infrastructure, Indian utilities cut power anywhere from 5 to 12 hours a day. That means, even though those schools have many low-cost laptops and tablets, kids can’t use them, because they run out of power. Rajendran thinks he has an answer: use discarded electric car (EV) batteries to provide the power. Two years ago, he started Totus Power, to make that happen. He’s now running an Indiegogo campaign to raise $40,000 to jumpstart production.Result1-2Several years ago, he got to talking to a friend who had also grown up in India. His pal was trying to start a social enterprise aimed at providing poor kids with a better education, but kept coming up against the problem of electricity brownouts. So Rajendran decided to try to find a more-efficient, low-cost way to provide portable electricity to schools. At the time, Rajendran was working for an electric car company. He’d also been on a crew that built what he says is the world’s fastest electric race car. In fact, his fascination with automobiles is what attracted him to electrical engineering in the first place. At his job, Rajendran was working on addressing the problem of recycling expensive EV batteries. After about five or six years, they degrade to only 70% of their original capacity and then they’re generally thrown into landfills; over the next three years, 17 million useful EV batteries will be crushed and tossed aside worldwide, according to Rajendran. Eventually, he realized those batteries were his solution. They may lack the oomph to power an electric car, but they were just fine for charging devices in Indian schools. What’s more, he wouldn’t have to design the electronics from scratch. So he left his job and embarked on an effort to design and build a portable power source the size of a water bottle, using discarded EVs, that could run a classroom with 20 tablets and a projector for 20 hours. Not that he had a ton of money saved up. According to Rajendran, for most of that time, he has basically been homeless, living with friends, in a rental car, or a garage, for example. He’s funded his work mostly through accelerators and pitch competitions. That’s included $40,000 from Startup Chile, which helped him build and test a prototype in Mumbai and Hyderabad, and $14,000 from the Good Money Challenge at Marquette University, among others . He also was accepted into Impact Engine, a social enterprise accelerator, in Chicago, where he got a $25,000 investment; he started there in October. (I wrote about Impact Engine here). Now, he wants to raise $40,000 to move into production of battery-management boards. (He’s raised $10,087 as of now). He has a two-year supply of batteries from a commercially deployed electric car. Ultimately, Rajendran wants to introduce the batteries to schools in other parts of the developing world. “The key pieces are in place,” he says. All he needs is some money. [© forbes.com] For EVLN posts use: http://evdl.org/evln/ http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html#nabble+template%2FNamlServlet.jtp%3Fmacro%3Dsearch_page%26node%3D413529%26query%3DEVLN%2Bbrucedp2%26days%3D0%26sort%3Ddate {brucedp.150m.com} -- View this message in context: http://electric-vehicle-discussion-list.413529.n4.nabble.com/EV-packs-2power-APS-schools-2compensate4-Indian-utilities-power-cuts-tp4672990.html Sent from the Electric Vehicle Discussion List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
