‘We are very excited about the emarketplace for energy-efficient appliances’ 

We have been building upon our learnings with various large-scale programmes . For example, Ujjala is now almost around 38 crore bulbs and it has developeda huge market. We also went in for distributed solar. I think we hold the largest portfolio of 200 MW distributed solar at the feeder level. Smart-metering, which was again started by EESL in 2018, is now seeing big traction.

A large number of bids have been coming and our subsidiary IntelliSmart has been able to garner a number of projects. So I believe this kind of intervention which started on a small scale and is now achieving bigger proportions.  In the buildings sector, I think we have done 12,710 buildings so far in the energy efficiency space. We are also teaming up with the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) for the Asia Low Carbon Buildings Transition (ALCBT) initiative. We have signed an MoU with CREDAI, for energy efficiency products. And we have our strategy 2030 document in place now. And we are going to scale this up as we go forward. 

I think electric buses are one of the best things that have happened in the recent past. We are dealing with public transport here, which is, in any case, a very efficient means of transport. Twenty-one per cent is what transport accounts for as far as greenhouse emissions are concerned. If we are able to create a good ecosystem of eBus transport across the country, the energy transition will get accelerated to a great extent. We have been able to aggregate demand for almost 12,000 buses of which concession agreements have been signed for more than 7,000 buses. 

Currently we are aggregating demand. The bid for 3,600 buses has gone live, spread across various states and cities across the country.

You would be aware that our Prime Minister and the President of the US last year had declared during our PM’s visit to US that they will be setting up a joint India-U.S. payment security mechanism. And this mechanism is now shaping up and that is now included.

With huge asset deployments and obviously a lot of money being put in by private operators, there was a concern that the payments might become a problem given the fact that many of the STUs are not making profits. With this payment security mechanism, there’s a two-tier structure, wherein there are some working capital limits and thereafter there will be backstop by a guarantee by the state for a direct debit mechanism through the RBI accounts.

This particular payment security mechanism forms an integral part of the bids now and will lend confidence not only to the bus operators but also to the lenders backing them. The second aspect was about batteries and we have now gained experience and have a better understanding of them. So our bids talk very clearly about the kind of battery life that we are looking at. And also to that extent, how much the batteries should last in a typical run.  

The e-charging infrastructure is taking shape in India. I understand there are almost around 12,000 chargers already installed in various locations across the country. We have almost around 450 chargers out of this. And we are now coming out with another system...EV Charging Infrastructure as a Service... where on the side of the client, we’ll pull in the land parcels and we’ll allow various charge point operators through an empowerment process so that there’s a single window clearance.

The charge point operators can come and invest through CESL in a service format whereby we will have some kind of a revenue-sharing agreement between the beneficiary institutions and CESL. On the other hand, we also believe that there is so much more to be done in the rental, hiring and lease space for four-wheelers. We have carried out a bid and we are looking at EV as a service.

Earlier, CESL and EESL brought in the vehicles when there were none. We deployed them on lease. Once the vehicles started moving on the roads, the interest got generated and there was network effect. Now, every second or third vehicle that you see on the road, especially in Delhi, is an electric vehicle. We have now shifted our strategy. We will not be investing. We want the market to develop. We are looking at various leasing partners for electric mobility in the four-wheeler space. We will aggregate demand from the government departments and allow the vehicles to be deployed by the private parties. The earlier attempt was more about creating a manufacturing ecosystem for EVs. Now it is changing to germinating more of leasing, hiring and rental market space in India.  

That is another big thing that we are doing. And it emanates out of basic data. The world over, almost around 45 per cent of energy is consumed by 20 basic appliances. Contrast this with the whole transport sector...it is only 21 per cent. So you know how much value or latent potential lies in this retail space. If you break this 45 per cent, you will find that 15 per cent of this is basically on the commercial side and almost an equal amount in the domestic space. 

We realized that until or unless we reach the retail side, make it a mass movement and socialize energy-efficient appliances in a big way, we will fall short of our attempts. Another big point is that this is the best bang for the buck today in terms of achieving the highest energy efficiency per unit of investment. So if we see this matrix, I think there are two sectors.

One is domestic and the other one is industrial. That is why we thought of coming out with an energy-efficient appliances marketplace, which will operate both in B2C and B2B formats. And this marketplace is currently undergoing some kind of rigorous testing and probably within the next one month, it will be there in the public domain. 

In the first phase, it will allow retail customers to procure energy-efficient appliances. And in the second phase, on the B2B side...B2B, in any, case we already do this through an offline mechanism. But we are very excited about this marketplace coming through. And the value of this marketplace is that it will be a one-stop platform for anything that is energy efficient. We’ll start with appliances and then move slowly ahead and bring in some small projects that can be commoditised to a great extent. 

I believe it will be energy-efficient fans and basically BLDC (brushless direct current) technology or even five-star fans. And the second will be electric cooking, that is induction cookstoves.

Basically, if you see the fans, it’s a very normal product which is used in every single home. And in India, with the kind of climate we have, it’s one of the basic building blocks of cooling and space cooling. It runs for almost 18 hours a day for about eight to 10 months a year on average. Now, there is the potential to knock off two-thirds of the energy consumption on a single fan if BLDC adoption takes place. So, I think BLDC is something that we are very, very upbeat about. We have a bid that is just under closing right now for 2 million, and we aim that we should be able to socialise it to almost around one crore customers in Phase 1.