Southampton-based SEaB Energy has launched a crowdfunding campaign that aims to bring, for the first time, a reliable source of electricity and water to a remote village in India that is currently off-grid. In meeting its aims to help tackle global energy poverty, the company said it had committed to fund the majority of the cost of the program and is now employing social media to highlight the issue and raise the remaining funds to initiate the project.
SEaB Energy’s waste-to-energy technology, housed in standardised shipping containers, converts food and organic waste into electricity, heat, water and fertilizer directly on site or where the waste is produced. Its clients include major US corporations, Portugal’s largest supermarket chain and an NHS hospital in the UK. The firm is now hoping its technology will benefit the hundreds of thousands of remote communities across the globe who have no reliable access to electricity.
In a 19 February release from the firm, Sandra Sassow, SEaB Energy’s CEO and Co-Founder, said:
“There could be as many as 50 million rural households in India without electricity but prohibitive infrastructure costs could mean that these people may be never ever connected to the grid. We want to raise this issue through social media which, if successful, will not only greatly help the villagers that will be participate in this first trial, but millions of others across India and in other developing nations”.
“Our ‘power-in-a-box technology means that the villagers can now generate a source of green electricity from their food and organic waste, for which there is a ready supply, without the need for expensive infrastructure”, added Sandra.
In partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, and the state government of Andhra Pradesh, SEaB Energy is part of a revolutionary new program that aims to transform the lives of villages in remote communities which, if successful, will be replicated throughout the state, with the potential of benefitting similar impoverished communities across the rest of India and even the globe. This program also ties up with the ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’, or Clean India Mission; a campaign that aims to clean up the streets, roads and infrastructure of India’s cities, smaller towns.
SEaB Energy is looking to raise one third of the necessary funds that will be used to prepare, transport and install two of its systems to the site in the village of Mori in Andhra Pradesh. The project will create new jobs in India and will also improve the skills of the villagers by training them to support the installation, operation and maintenance of the systems, thus becoming SEaB certified mechanical, plumbing and electrical technicians.
With a growing customer base in both the private and public sector, including Fortune 500 companies, SEaB Energy now has distribution in all of the major markets around the globe. In 2017, it joined Unreasonable Goals, a partnership between governments, multinationals, and Unreasonable Group with the singular focus of taking urgent action in combatting climate change through innovative renewables technology. The company is currently participating at C5 Capital’s ‘Peacetech Accelerator’ in Washington DC which brings together investors and large corporations that will lay the groundwork for future initiatives.
To support the Village FLEXIBUSTER™ project please visit the Kickstarter.com crowdfunding page here.
