IIT Bombay’s flagship programme ‘Solar Urja through Localisation for Sustainability (SoULS)’ has won the ‘grand prize’ in the IEEE’s Empower a Billion Lives (EBL) competition.
The finals were held during the last week of September 2019 at Baltimore, USA.
The award includes a citation and Grand Prize of $100,000 (Rs 71 lakh).
SoULS is based on the idea of ‘power for all’ for providing clean, efficient, affordable and reliable energy access even to the last mile households. SoULS initiative encourages a localised solution involving local communities and ensures the transition from a ‘program-driven model’ to ‘market-driven model’.
The competition is organized by IEEE, a volunteer organisation whose goal is to foster technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of all.
IEEE’s EBL is a global competition aimed at fostering innovation to develop solutions to energy access. Starting from a pool of 459 registered teams from 70+ countries, EBL has gone through a rigorous evaluation process by a team of international experts at five regional competitions to select 23 global finalists.
Selection of the final winners was based on technology, social impact, business models and field-testing data, said news reports.
IIT Bombay’s SoULS was selected for the finals after winning the ‘Grand Regional Prize’ winner at the regional rounds held on December 18, 2018, at Chennai.
SoULS was represented at the event by Professor Chetan Singh Solanki (Department of Energy Science and Engineering) and Professor Jayendran Veketeswaran (Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research), who are the principal investigators of the SoULS initiative.
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