Far from all the tension over the now-historic trust vote and just as far from Virar where power-starved residents vented their angst at a railway station and on the railway tracks, is Alternate Source. And in this small shop in Bandra sits Ravindranath Katre (54), whose endeavor is to contribute his might to the country’s energy security, marketing solar and, to a lesser extent, wind-based solutions to meet Mumbaiites’ electricity needs.

Katre, a physics graduate from Kirti College, says he always wanted to do something in the field of electronics. He worked for a number of companies before breaking out on his own. He started with a factory manufacturing instruments, before moving on to trying to help large industries save power.

“I used to market inverters and power saving devices, but soon there reached a point when you could only make cosmetic changes in them. Soon I began to think about what more I could do in this line. Then one day I saw a television ad for a solar heater. I was really taken up with the idea,” Katre says. He is now one of the handful of distributors I the city promoting the use of solar power.

Without rubbishing conventional energy sources, Kantre explains in detail how economical solar energy is. “It is energy for free,” he adds in a rather matter of fact manner. “India has an acute energy crisis. There will always be a shortfall since even new powerplants will take a generation or more to have effect,” he says.

On the nuclear deal, he says: “It will probably be a while before the trickledown is really felt. The grid can never really be substituted by solar or wind energy but these can surely supplement them.”

The most obvious way for people to adopt its use, he says, is to install solar water heaters. “Instead of burning coal to turn it into steam for turbines to turn it into electricity and once again turn it to heat in your geyser, imagine if you could simply use heat directly and save all this effort, and incidental heat dissipation,” Katre exclaims.

According to him the problem lies with the fact that people don’t really think about something as simple as their bath water. “What they don’t realise is that 30 per cent of their electricity bill is due to their geysers. So in theory you are saving 30 per cent on it every month and even taxing the grid less. The indirect implications of people doing this might even increase the grid’s lifespan. Also, in areas such as Virar, solar electricity generators can power basic appliances. I have customers in Nashik who do this too,” he says.