In January 2017, I sat in front of a camera and did something I had never done before — I spoke directly to the people of India. Not through an advertisement. Not through a press release. Just me, talking candidly about why I felt compelled to start an educational YouTube channel about solar energy and power.
Most people assumed it was a marketing move. It was not. It was a frustration move.
The Problem I Could Not Stop Thinking About
By 2017, Su-Kam had been building inverters, UPS systems, and solar products for nearly three decades. We were selling across 70 countries. Our R&D team had filed more patents than any other company in the Indian power backup industry. We had built products that genuinely worked — DSP-based inverters, MPPT solar charge controllers, touchscreen solar PCUs.
But I kept encountering the same problem everywhere I went. Ordinary Indians — educated people, business owners, homeowners — had almost no understanding of how electricity actually worked in their own homes. They could not tell you how much power their AC consumed. They did not know the difference between a watt and a unit. They had no idea why their electricity bills were what they were, and therefore no idea how much money solar could actually save them.
You cannot make a good decision about something you do not understand. And I realised that no matter how good our products were, people could not benefit from them if they lacked the basic knowledge to see why they needed them.
What Most Indians Did Not Know About Their Own Electricity
Here is a simple example. A standard LED bulb consumes 10 watts. A ceiling fan consumes around 80 watts. A television around 50 watts. A 1.5 tonne air conditioner consumes close to 2,000 watts — 2 kilowatts. Run that AC for five hours a day and you have consumed 10 units of electricity in a single day. At Indian electricity rates, that is a significant number — and most people had no way to estimate it without someone explaining it to them clearly.
This is not a complicated calculation. But nobody was teaching it. Not in schools. Not in government campaigns. Certainly not by electricity boards, who had no incentive to help consumers reduce their bills.
So I decided Su-Kam would do it. We would become the educators.
Why YouTube, and Why in 2017
By 2017, YouTube had reached every corner of India that a television signal had not. A farmer in rural Haryana could watch a video on his phone about how solar panels work. A shopkeeper in Tamil Nadu could learn whether a sine wave inverter was better for his equipment than a square wave one. The distribution problem that had always made mass education so expensive — reaching people where they actually were — had been solved by a platform that was free.
I had spent my entire career solving distribution problems in hardware. Here was the same problem solved in software, for knowledge. I would have been foolish not to use it.
The Su-Kam YouTube channel was built on a simple principle: explain everything. How inverters work. How to install a solar charge controller. How to calculate your electricity consumption. How to compare battery technologies. How to design a rooftop solar system. Not as advertisements — as genuine tutorials that would be useful whether or not the viewer ever bought a Su-Kam product.
What the Channel Became
Over the years, the Su-Kam channel covered nearly every product we built — each one carrying a story of the engineering challenge behind it, the market gap it was designed to fill, and the Indian conditions it was built to survive. High voltage MPPT solar charge controllers built with DSP chips when nobody in India was thinking about solar. Plastic body inverters that India Today called one of the top ten innovations of the decade. Touchscreen solar PCUs with built-in WiFi for smartphone monitoring. Solar street lights running on lithium batteries instead of lead-acid — lighter, longer-lasting, more reliable.
Every video was a chapter in a larger story: that India could solve its own energy problems with Indian engineering, built for Indian conditions, explained to Indian consumers in a language they could actually use.
What I Want You to Take From This
If you are a founder building something genuinely new, you have a responsibility that goes beyond the product itself. You have to educate the market. Not because it is good for business — though it is — but because people deserve to understand the things that affect their daily lives. Energy affects every Indian family, every single day. The least we could do was make sure they understood it.https://youtu.be/4XV5WGnWHy4
That is why the channel exists. That is why these blogs exist. And that is why I am still talking about it in 2026 — because the work of energy education in India is nowhere near finished.
Watch the original video where I explain why we started this channel: Why did we start this YouTube Channel? — Su-Kam Solar
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