BIOMASS GASIFER ELECTRICITY AND STUDY OF WILLINGNESS TO PAY

Abstract

Electricity form grid to rural consumers has not been
available all the time. Throughout the day outages is a
very common circumstance. Due to the dispersal of
villages, the State Electricity Boards (SEBSs) have not
been able to collect their dues in time. Besides, the
rampant power theft is also been responsible for poor
quality of power and outages. Thus, the SEBs has
preferred to keep their infrastructures unutilized and paid
little attention for its development. Recently, the
Government of India has engaged “last mile service
providers†in villages through franchisee system for the
collection of revenue and also for providing electricity
throughout the day. As it is still on an experimental stage
and only concentrated to few villages, therefore the only
alternative to villagers is to take the help of standalone
off- grid devices. Amongst the standalone off-grid
devices, the biomass gasification is the major source of
electricity to the villagers. But, per unit cost of
production of electricity is always been higher than grid
electricity. Keeping the higher price in mind, would it be
relevant for the villagers to know the higher amount
required to be paid by them. To arrive at this additional
higher amount Willingness To Pay method (WTP) is
used for biomass gasification system. The biomass based
power generation system has been functioning for over 8
years (1999–2007) in Baharbari village of Araria district,
Bihar in India which consists of a population of 2500
people. Electricity from gasifier has been used for
lighting household, pumping for irrigation, and also
connected with few micro-enterprise and occasionally it
is used in some marriage party.