6 Amazing Facts About Baripatha – Odisha’s First 100% Solar Powered Village

Baripatha has become the first village in Odisha to be entirely solar-powered, with an individual solar unit for every household. 

After waiting for electricity for several years, lives of the residents of Baripatha, a tribal village in Odisha, changed for the better on Oct. 2, 2015. On this day, Baripatha became the first village in the state to be completely powered by solar energy.

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Here are five things to know about the village and this project:

1. Baripatha is located about 25 km southwest of Bhubaneswar. The village has 61 households, and a population of about 350 people.

Picture for representation only. Photo Credit: Premasagar Rose/Flickr

2. The project cost Rs. 7 lakh and was co-funded by the solar products manufacturer, ECCO Electronics, and the power solutions provider, Jackson Group.

“We requested companies such as Nalco, Ecco Solar and Jackson Solar to help us with the solar project for the village…This model can be replicated all over Odisha to provide power to its nearly 3,900 villages,” senior IPS officer Joydeep Nayak, who is the driving force behind this initiative, told The Times of India.

Picture for representation only. Photo Credit: Flickr

3. Under this project, individual solar units with two solar home-lighting systems, which also have the facility of charging mobile phones and other devices, have been installed for each of the 61 households in the village.

This is accompanied by a central one-kilowatt unit for the entire village that will be used to power the eight street lamps along with a LED television set and TV set-top box that have been provided to the villagers and have been installed in their community centre.

Picture for representation only. Photo Credit: Flickr

4. The central solar unit has eight panels that can be folded quickly in case of cyclones and high-speed winds that are frequent in Odisha.

The unit can also operate a one-horsepower irrigation pump.

Picture for representation only. Photo Credit: Flickr

5. What makes the project in Baripatha is that in most rural solar projects, there is a central unit which supplies power to all households.

But that leads to many problems like the exposed cables being tapped by villagers. In this case, some households draw more power than their share, which in turn causes the central line to trip because of overload. Thus, to avoid such issues, individual units have been set up for each household.

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Picture for representation only. Photo Credit: Flickr

6. The entire solar project is low cost, low maintenance and community owned.

The only maintenance needed now is the regular cleaning of panels and ensuring that water levels of batteries for the central unit are at the required mark. According to ECCO CEO, Vivek Bihani, the whole village was involved in the planning and execution of the project. “Village mukhia Narayan Hisa along with a local ITI diploma holder, Epil Kumar Singh, are responsible for the maintenance,” he informed.

Source: YouTube

The project was inaugurated on Friday by the chairman and managing director of National Aluminium Company Limited (NALCO), Tapan Kumar Chand. He, along with the other state officials, distributed the two lighting systems to each household.

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