Economic viability improvement of solar powered Indian rural banks through DC grids

Power shortages result in power outages for period of 8 to 10 Hrs a day in rural areas due to significant gap between electricity demand and supply. Rural banking is one of the sectors severely affected by power. Majority of population in emerging markets like India live in rural areas. Therefore, reliability and operational efficiency of rural banking is of utmost importance to include rural population into national main stream. To overcome the problem, solar hybrid power system with battery backup is gaining popularity. However, expensive components like solar array, battery in the system hindering its wide adaptation. In this paper, efficient DC electrical distribution is proposed to reduce the sizes of expensive solar and battery components. Economic analysis is performed for a typical core banking rural bank. It is shown that by adopting DC grid, Rs. 1.22 lakh can be saved per rural bank. The saving will be Rs. 1.83 billion, if DC grid is implemented across all the 15,000 branches of rural banks.