The mission of the PACEsetter Fund is to accelerate the commercialization of innovative off-grid clean energy access solutions by providing early-stage grant funding that would allow businesses to develop and test innovative products, business models and systems. The Fund's main purpose is to improve the viability of off-grid renewable energy businesses that sell small scale (under 1 megawatt) clean energy systems to individuals and communities without access to grid connected power or with limited/ intermittent access. (less than 8 hours per day)
Out of 139 innovative technologies and business model, only 9 made it to PACEsetter funding. CES MICRO initiative is one of these nine innovations. The team is highly encouraged by the prestigious award and has already implemented monitoring of first microgrid under the initiative
MICRO (Microgrid Initiative for Campus and Rural Opportunities) initiative by CES addresses the fundamental challenges faced by the developers and funding agencies by creating an ecosystem to make microgrids sustainable and economical. Through this initiative we want to have a real time monitoring system installed at as many microgrids and use the archived data to build analytics for
- Optimizing the life of an asset ( specially batteries)
- Predicting failures in advance
- And Deriving the right INR/kWh cost make such micro grids sustainable.
Customized Energy Solutions (CES) was closely watching developments in rural microgrids in India since 2014. CES team was then of opinion that with our expertise in the field of energy storage, we can help in correct sizing of battery and identification of the right energy storage technology which is the pain point in most of the solar and wind based grids and with that can make the electricity affordable for microgrids consumers. But we were touching just tip of iceberg or solving part of the puzzle with this solution. After interacting with many stakeholders across the industry over last couple of years, it was realized that we would need to touch upon a lot of gaps in the industry. The problem areas are not only technical but also social and business related like bill collection, linking of electrification to economic development, aggregation of demand from small microgrids developers for better product options and negotiations. Hence, we decided to come up with a holistic service platform called MICRO.
