Nithya Mahendrakumara

Village Energy

Village Energy is a team of entrepreneurs that have emerged from one of the largest and most technologically advanced microgrid operators in the world. Village Energy has a vision to help eliminate energy poverty by building thriving communities and helping grid operators to improve the reliability and affordability of providing energy to remote villages and towns. We partner with grid operators to help renewable energy to accelerate in a community. Ideally, renewable energy is distributed, such as solar panels on the roofs of businesses and homes. This gives members of the community the opportunity to begin to access more reliable power, reduce their power spend, and participate as owners.  ​Our grid operator partners benefit through improved profitability, higher return on capital and better service performance in the community.​ Projects: Our pilot project is based in Pagidiroy, Andhra Pradesh , India where we have installed approximately 150 IoT devices at customer homes. The project has been running for over 12 months and has proved very successful. Achievements: Winners of the Social Alpha Energy Challenge (SAEC 2.0) - 15 winners. Under this challenge, a total of fifteen startups has been selected as winners from over 150 applicants across the country. The selected startups were screened for their unique technology and business model, strong focus on affordability and accessibility and social, economic and environmental impact. Notably, the Social Alpha Energy Challenge 2.0 was launched in April 2019. The winning solutions leverage technologies for enabling energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, innovative electric vehicle (EV) solutions, clean cooking devices, innovative battery technologies, energy monitoring systems, and hydro turbine technologies, among others. We were also most recently announced as one of 42 semi finalists of the Australian Technologies Competition and we have now progressed to Round 2 of judging.