SMA’s corporate blog, Sunny, has featured our Gutu microgrid — a guest post written by our own Raju Maharajan, published on the official SMA blog on 3 April 2019.
The article tells the story of Gutu, a village of around 1,000 people roughly 800 km from Kathmandu that had no public electricity supply before this project. Daily life ran on the sun’s schedule: makeshift solar setups that barely charged a phone, the smell and noise of diesel generators, and candlelight after dark. In March 2019, that changed — Peak Power, as system operator, connected 275 households along with the post office, local businesses, schools, the hospital, and administrative offices to a solar-powered micro-grid.
The system centers on a 100 kW PV plant delivered over more than 7 kilometres of overhead line, built around 12 SMA Sunny Island 8.0H-12 grid-forming inverters, an SMA Multicluster Box-12.2 for AC coupling, and two SMA Sunny Tripower CORE1 PV inverters, with Sacred Sun VRLA battery cells providing storage for use after sundown. Every building is metered with smart, pre-paid meters, and the community reinvests that revenue back into the cooperative that runs the plant — designed to keep it a sustainable, self-sufficient business rather than a one-off installation.
As the SMA piece describes it, the impact went well beyond just having lights on at night: the hospital, government office, and bank can now reliably run IT and communications equipment, the school’s computer room is back in use after years offline, farmers are using electric grinding and husking machines to process their harvest faster, and local hotels are more attractive to trekkers with reliable lighting, hot water, and cable TV. The plant itself created several full-time local jobs in operations and maintenance.
Gutu was delivered in partnership with ADB, AEPC, and local partner Motherland Energy Group Pvt. Ltd. You can read the full SMA blog post here, or see the technical write-up and photos on our Gutu Community Microgrid project page.