Really? According to wiki, India's middle-class makes anywhere from $10 to $50 per day. When you factor in that this will cost a lot more than $3500, would these really sell like crazy?
Great idea. I can't afford to loan this amount, but I do make micro-loans regularly on kiva.org. Would love to see some loans appear there for these kinds of power systems.
They can afford scooters, which cost one quarter that much. On $50 a day, it could be saved for in less than a year even if it costs $5000. Relative to their income, Indians have a lot of savings, due to their high savings rate (30%+). India's accumulated household wealth per adult is $5500. If you have two pairs of parents and one pair of grand-parents in one house, that is 6 * $5500 = $33000. Could be worth it, IMO it depends what is the lifetime of one such installation.
EDIT: Thanks for the correction on scooter pricing.
You'll find about 50 million people in middle class in India, who'll earn about $1k a month. Once you buy it, ship it, install it etc, I think $5k is a pretty typical cost figure.
That's quite steep. It's nearly 50% of your income. Also consider that as a rule, generally, the less affluent you are, the smaller percentage of income will be 'disposable' income. i.e. if you make $100k, you might have $60k in essential expenses, the remaining 40% of your income can be spent on savings or non-essential consumption like holidays. But if you make $5k like an average person in India might, you'll be hard pressed to not spend the vast majority on essential spending. So an investment that's 50% of a 1-year income may sound reasonable, but not when 95% of your income normally goes to essential expenses. That'd mean that you'd have to forgo 10 years of your entire disposable income to finance this.
Now how essential is it? I've traveled both in Africa and Asia and am familiar with powercuts (hell, I'd get em monthly in Montreal, too!) Generally though, it's not something I'd spend a lot of money on to fix. Cooking and heating is still gas powered. Essential lighting tops out at 100W, no need for a $3.5k battery that can deliver 20x that power. My smartphone/laptop are battery powered.
I mean, don't get me wrong, power cuts suck and nobody likes them. And for businesses (different story) they can be a disaster. (e.g. check out the World Bank 'Doing Business' reports [0], they look at power cuts affecting industry. It's a big factor)
But for homes? Most people cope just fine. You lose your TV and maybe your wifi if you don't have mobile internet, the rest can be managed.
Anyway India is obviously going to become a huge market, but that's a pretty long-term thing. You have hundreds of millions of middle class consumers in OECD countries who have the purchasing power and different motivations (environmental), backed by governments that are shifting to pro-solar, and huge profits-first industries that are seeing solar drop to super competitive prices within the next 10-20 years. India probably won't be a huge market in comparison. China perhaps, they're bigger, have more solar capacity and more purchasing power.
As for the scooter, you can buy 5-6 of them for the price of installing one of these, new, let alone second hand. And they're an essential part of transportation for which having nothing, or public transport is often not a viable alternative.
