A study of Willingness To Pay by users of electricity available from biomass gasifer

Abstract

Electricity form grid to rural consumers has not been available users. Throughout the day electricity outages have been very common to users. Also due to dispersal of villages the state electricity boards (SEBSs) have not been able to collect their dues in times. Also rampant power theft has also been responsible for poor quality of power mainly due to theft and outages. Thus the SEBs had preferred to keep their infrastructures as it is pays little attention for development. Recently government of India has engaged “last smile service providers” in villages through franchisee system for collection of revenue and for providing electricity throughout the day. But it has been on experimental stage thus the only alternative to villagers has been to take the help of standalone devices. Among stand alone devices biomass gasification has been a major source of electricity to villagers. But the per unit cost of production of electricity has been higher than grid electricity in view of this it would be relevant to know the whether the villagers would be able to pay higher price for electricity. To arrive at this the study had used Willingness To Pay method (WTP). The biomass based power generation system has been functioning for over 8 years (1999–2007) in Baharbari village of Bihar India consists of a population of 2500 people, Electricity from gasifier has been used for lighting household, pumping for irrigation, connected with few microenterprise and occasionally in some marriage party.