Sustainable development should be brought into focus immediately. In the busy lifestyle, people often forget about the fact that eventually the natural resources will come to an end. It is high time to bring in change and support the innovations and technologies, which are helpful for the sustainable growth of people.
In our endeavour towards finding, The 5 Most Recommended Green Energy Providers, we came across Renkube Private Limited. It is a solar research and development company in the field of motion free optical tracking of solar panels.
In the following interview, Laxmikanth Balaji, the CEO and Founder of Renkube Private Limited shares his opinions about how sustainable development is necessary.
Below are the highlights of the interview.
Please brief our audience about your company, its values, vision, and mission.
Renkube Private Limited is a renewable energy R&D company started by ex-Cisco technologist. We consider ourselves as sun ray sculptor and have a pioneering design, technology, and methodology to redirect sunlight to a given destination in an optimal and efficient manner as dictated by the solar application.
Our first innovation in this journey is an innovative glass for solar panel that boosts the energy generation in Solar panel by 20% more at no additional increase in panel cost.
What kind of green solutions or services does your company provides?
We are proud to call ourselves as Research Oriented Solar company that is on the path to revolutionize the solar world with a new Solar Panel design, which will make solar panels more affordable and will accelerate Solar adoption with its attractive payback period and cost economics.
We are bringing to the market an innovative light harvesting glass that gathers more sunlight and redirects it to the solar cells thereby increasing the efficiency of the solar panel by 20%. This glass is engineered to work purely by the virtue of its design.
It works without any motors/electro-mechanical components and without, chemical coating, and without any special chemical composition of glass. The solar panel cost remains the same as the current market price (Rs 19-Rs22/Wp) but the solar project capital cost marginally increases by 5%. Thus, we bring all the benefits of a Single axis tracker at zero maintenance cost other than regular cleaning of solar panels.
What kind of challenges have you faced industry-wise?
Any innovation in the field of Solar have involved multiple years of research and has deep soaking time to test, validate, and get accepted in mainstream. Indian Solar Industry have always been piggybacking and been late in adoption of leading solar innovation like multi-busbar solar cells, advanced solar cells, PERC technology, BiFacial Solar Panels, half cut solar cells etc.
Just like how the Indian pharmaceutical industry underwent a complete transformation decade back. Even Indian Solar Industry needs to invest more in developing technologies towards making the solar the default choice for power in India and across the world.
We need to nurture and facilitate more solar startups with incubation testbeds and lab facilities for quick prototyping and testing. We are indeed very thankful to Swelect Energy Systems and Enfros solar in helping our prototyping efforts. There are several other manufacturers who have come forward to collaborate and take it forward to the next level post our pilot activities.
Being in the green energy business, how important do you think sustainability is? How are you contributing to a sustainable future through your company?
We strongly believe in the UN goals that “Sustainability is meeting the current needs without disturbing the resources for future generations”. With skyrocketing prices of electricity bill and fuel like petrol, making a green switch is no longer an option but the default economical choice of people.
We as a green energy startup, will facilitate the switch quicker with our efficient products. For the future generations to come, sustainable living is an essential and necessary skill needed to survive on earth.
As our Solar panels are 20% more efficient than traditional ones, using our technology for a 1 MW solar plant will additionally reduce the carbon footprint by 7300 tons, which is equivalent to planting 0.1 Million trees (EPA link: 1 ton of co2 emission is equivalent to planting 15 trees)
Where do you envision yourself and your company to be in the long run and what are your future goals?
There is no reason why India cannot produce 100% of its electricity needs from solar and we will make every effort to make this a realty. All manufacturing side innovation aimed to reduce the cost of making energy by vertically integrating the manufacturing.
All the components have vastly helped us to reach the tariff of ₹2 per unit of electricity and going forward newer innovation like ours can make an impact in bringing the prices down by at least another 40% to 50% in the next decade. Not all are going to believe to this prediction as many of them believe that we have already reached rock bottom prices.
We want to be recognized as the R&D powerhouse in the solar world by supplying our efficient light harvesting glass design to glass manufacturers. We want to be ‘Intel inside’ in the solar photovoltaic world and want to expand our customer footprint with top PV manufacturers worldwide.
Solar Photovoltaic will be our steppingstone in the solar world and we intend to proliferate the Motion Free Optical Tracking in myriads of solar applications such as Solar Water Heater, Solar Shelf for daylighting applications, Green Buildings, Building Integrated Photovoltaic, etc.
What is the current scenario of the green energy space pertaining to India?
India is at the right inflection point to see accelerated adoption of solar. We have an ambitious goal of generating 450 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030, a tremendous ecosystem push for producing indigenous technologies, and PLI incentives for manufacturers to promote Made in India products.
Now with the right set of innovation and government subsidies we are set on a trajectory to promote a sustainable future with solar energy.
Brief us about the featured person and their journey in the green energy space.
Balaji is the CEO of Renkube Private Limited and the lead inventor in creating the Motionless Optical Tracking at Renkube. He is an eminent technologist with deep strategic and business insight and has been the recipient of prestigious Cisco Pioneer Awards three times in his career. Balaji holds about 13 USPTO approved patents.
His broad interests include solar PV, BIPV, solar water heater, AI/cognitive systems, other renewable energy solutions related to green building and reduction of carbon footprint. Having reached pinnacle of his technical career at Cisco, he dived into his entrepreneur journey in Solar as it was a booming field back in 2016.
He was always driven with a determination to create a meaningful innovation for a sunshine rich country like India. Balaji started his journey in converting thermal energy from the sun to electricity, but the cost economics didn’t work out. Hence, he took a conscious decision to create an innovation in the glass design as optical tracking was an unsolved problem for the last 40 years.
He then chose to apply his 20 years of deep software expertise in the cross-disciplinary field of Solar and developed a proprietary machine learning software. The intelligent software emulates the movements of the sun and can create a 3-dimensional CAD designs to redirect sunlight as dictated by the solar application. To put it in a nutshell- we have digitalized the process of creating efficient glass design for any solar application through a software created by us.
