Community-level Renewables and Storage

Chief Minister Youth Centre in Sohrarim, Meghalaya, India

Through our project with UC Berkeley’s Smart Village Movement, we are working toward creating a self sustaining remote community empowered by Hygge Energy’s open innovation platform. In addition to promoting clean energy as the preferred choice for communities while enabling our partners and customers to earn financial returns, we endeavor to create a social impact as well. Consequently, we have partnered with University of California, Berkeley, under their initiative called Smart Village Movement, to provide our solution to a remote village called Sohrarim situated in East Khasi Hills, Meghalaya.

A skill development school in this village operates on our technology platform, which is integrated with a microgrid system comprising solar PV and batteries to ensure uninterrupted power supply. The energy generated is used to not only electrify the school campus, but also operate power tools required in skill training programs sponsored by Salesforce. We aim to make the village grid-independent with a solution that is sustainable, scalable, economical and commercially profitable.

Our project with Smart Village Movement is a collaborative initiative between the Government of Meghalaya and UC Berkeley. One of their major verticals is energy – more specifically, sustainable and efficient sources of energy for villages that come under their purview. Through this partnership and our renewable models, we aim to bring not only clean,

Sustainable and affordable electricity to the villages of Meghalaya, but also focus on improving the quality of life in these remote villages by offering Hygge Energy platform for peer-to peer trading of surplus clean energy harvested.

Customers: Government of Meghalaya and UC Berkeley

Industry: Community Development

Headquarters: Sohrarim, East Khasi Hills, Meghalaya

Website: https://www.smartvillagemovement.org

Conrad Sangma, Chief Minister, Meghalaya, and Prateek Saxena, CEO, Hygge Energy

Town in Ontario, Canada

We are implementing our innovative platform to demonstrate benefits of 'Community Net-Metering' at a facility owned by a town in Ontario that is largely a farming community. The local utility is going to support this project with a dedicated utility-owned community energy storage to provide not only storage of excess solar generation but also use it as demand response resource to enhance reliability. Hygge's technology, including our proprietary Hygge Boxes around the community, will track, record and coordinate renewable energy production, consumption and storage.

This project aims to provide the local utility and Ontario with an alternative to feed-in-tariff and net metering to reduce the cost of energy delivery. Our platform also links carbon credits to renewable generation, making it profitable for prosumers such as farms to invest in renewable generation without subsidies. The results from this project will provide inputs to the Ontario Energy Board and the IESO to design a next-generation community net metering program, thus rendering renewable energy cost-effective and sustainable without subsidies.

Community Action Platform for Energy (CAPE), Milton Keynes, UK

While being incubated in Tech Mahindra, we created an innovative online platform called Community Action Platform for Energy (CAPE) in the UK. This project was conducted in partnership with Milton Keynes Council, SmartKlub, Satellite Catapult and Open University.

The platform invites energy consumers and producers to work with local authorities to kickstart integrated renewable energy projects for improving community housing, lowering carbon emissions, reducing energy poverty, generating savings for communities, and developing the local economy through employment generation. We developed the pioneering technology of converting satellite imagery data to digital data, and connecting it to the city council’s demographic data to overlay an energy efficiency map of the city.

This solution has been honored with several awards, including a BusinessGreen Technology Award for Social Impact Technology of the Year in 2017, and a Smart Cities UK Award under the category of Housing, also in 2017.

It was recognized by Patrick Allcorn, Head of Local Energy, Department for Business, Hygge Energy and Industrial Strategy, as a solution that could not only stimulate investment and business growth in the UK, but also support BEIS’s main energy objectives.