BIOMASS GASIFER ELECTRICITY AND STUDY OF WILLINGNESS TO PAY

Electricity form grid to rural consumers has not been available all the time. Throughout the day outages is a very common circumstance. Due to the dispersal of villages, the State Electricity Boards (SEBSs) have not been able to collect their dues in time. Besides, the rampant power theft is also been responsible for poor quality of power and outages. Thus, the SEBs has preferred to keep their infrastructures unutilized and paid little attention for its development. Recently, the Government of India has engaged “last mile service providers” in villages through franchisee system for the collection of revenue and also for providing electricity throughout the day. As it is still on an experimental stage and only concentrated to few villages, therefore the only alternative to villagers is to take the help of standalone off- grid devices. Amongst the standalone off-grid devices, the biomass gasification is the major source of electricity to the villagers. But, per unit cost of production of electricity is always been higher than grid electricity. Keeping the higher price in mind, would it be relevant for the villagers to know the higher amount required to be paid by them. To arrive at this additional higher amount Willingness To Pay method (WTP) is used for biomass gasification system. The biomass based power generation system has been functioning for over 8 years (1999–2007) in Baharbari village of Araria district, Bihar in India which consists of a population of 2500 people. Electricity from gasifier has been used for lighting household, pumping for irrigation, and also connected with few micro-enterprise and occasionally it is used in some marriage party.