Environmental research

Tremendous efforts has been made by government of Nepal to electrify the remote houses through solar home systems (SHS) providing subsidy via Alternative Energy Promotion Centre (AEPC). AEPC has also developed Nepal Interim PV Quality Assurance (NIPQA) mechanism and more than 50,000 SHSs have been installed in remote Himalayan huts of Nepal. But there are still 2.4 million households, who are still using kerosene lamp or fatwood from pine to light the houses. High initial investment cost of a typical SHS is the limiting factor for the wider scale dissemination of conventional SHS. Thus a low cost alternative to the conventional SHS such as Solar Tukis can displace the kerosene lamp or fatwood from the rural houses of Nepal more effectively. This alternative is affordable to the poor households even without government subsidy. Studies have shown that a rural family uses 4 litres of Kerosene and disposes 2 units of battery per month and together a single household spend NRS 150 to light the house. Likewise, at the cost of a conventional SHS, more than ten units of proposed Solar Tukis could be installed resulting in over 40 liters of kerosene and over 20 units of disposable dry cell batteries saved per month. The project has proposed to install 600 solar tukis which would save 28,800 liters of kerosene. Converting this saving into CO2, around 50 ton of CO2 will not be emitted in the atmosphere. Quality assurance, removing technical (developing village technicians), financial barrier (establishment of credit fund), commercial barrier (developing tecnical enterprenures) as well as information barrier at the local level are the main targets of the proeject. The project has signed with Winrock International to develop CDM for the installation of Solar Tukis. So far the project is able to install 578 Solar Tuki in two project district where as the grantee has able to access funding from both Development Market Fund and Nepal Development Market Fund from World Bank. In addition, the project has also mobilised the local financial institutions to install the Solar Tukies. So far the grantee has distributed additional 1304 solar Tukis in additional 21 districts of Nepal.

Nepal