The Economic Times files from Gurgaon on the rise of the city’s solar-product makers — and Su-Kam’s Kunwer Sachdev on why an inverter with a small solar panel is the honest fix for wasted household electricity.
The Economic Times’ Mamta Sharma files from Gurgaon on a quiet shift: the Millennium City, tired of DISCOM outages and rising tariffs, is turning to solar — and the solar-product makers based there are, in her phrase, “beaming happily.” One of the operators anchoring her story is Su-Kam’s Kunwer Sachdev, whose take on inverter efficiency and honest solar-first product design pulls the piece into focus.
A city ready to buy
The ET report tallies the market: dealers reporting 30 per cent demand growth, enquiries up 200 per cent, and a young population that finally understands why renewables matter. Rising petrol prices, chronic power tariff hikes and daily shortages are pushing Gurgaon households toward solar to run ACs, inverters and pumps — not out of ideology, but because it starts to pencil out.
Su-Kam’s bet: fix the inverter first
Sachdev tells ET that Su-Kam has developed solar inverters and solar charge controllers — the plumbing that converts sun into usable household power. His pitch is technical and blunt: regular inverters waste as much as 50 per cent of the electricity that goes into charging them. Bolt a small solar panel onto that inverter, he says, and the electricity used to charge it is effectively saved. Su-Kam’s solar inverters, he adds, offer sinusoidal output, stable voltage and frequency, good conversion efficiency even under partial load, high overload capability and tolerance for battery-voltage swings.
“Almost 50 per cent of electricity is wasted in inverters. An innovative and affordable solution could be to install a small solar panel along with the inverter, so that the electricity used to charge it is saved.”— Kunwer Sachdev, MD & Founder, Su-Kam • The Economic Times, 29 November 2012
Solar Home Light — two lamps, one radio, one phone charge
The other Su-Kam product ET highlights is the company’s Solar Home Light System — a cost-effective, self-install kit designed for households at the edge of the grid. Sachdev walks the reporter through the actual numbers: two LED lamps running on a solar battery, one lamp glowing continuously for about 45 hours on a full charge, or both lamps together for around 22 hours. The user can even run a radio and charge a mobile phone off the same pack.
Push from government, pressure from cheap imports
The demand side, ET notes, has government tailwind. Solar water heaters carry a 30 per cent subsidy, and plots larger than 500 sq ft are required to install one. But the supply side is under strain. Cheap Chinese solar lanterns and lights are flooding the market. Sachdev raises a second, sharper concern: inefficient new entrants who spotted the money but not the engineering — players selling inferior product that, in his words, “do not last for more than six months.” That, he argues, is the real threat to consumer trust in the category.
Why the 2012 report still reads well
More than a decade on, Mamta Sharma’s piece is worth returning to because it captured the moment Gurgaon’s solar market went from experiment to industry — and because Sachdev’s call, then, was already what it is now: build serious hardware, price it honestly, and don’t let the cheapest possible product decide what the customer thinks solar is capable of.
Combating power shortage: Solar product makers rise & shine in Gurgaon — The Economic Times →