EESL: Lighting The Path To Success

Since May 2013, EESL’s managing director Saurabh Kumar has been successfully running the PSU, which comes under the Ministry of Power. In an interaction with Electronics Bazaar’s Abid Hasan, he shares the organisation’s growth model, current key focus areas, the pricing of LED bulbs and EESL’s ‘new kids on the block’—smart meters and electric vehicles.

- Abid Hasan

On a lazy Saturday afternoon, it’s quite unusual to see a government executive working with utmost urgency. Saurabh Kumar, managing director of Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL), had called some of his key team members for an important meeting in the organisation’s Noida office when I went to meet him. When asked if EESL works on a Saturday, he replies that when he was joining EESL, he was told that, “Leave is not a right, it’s a privilege.”

Well, there is no doubt that with this kind of dedication, EESL has seen a growth of more than 100 percent over the last few years, and has also become a case study for the International Energy Agency.

Kumar says that energy efficiency is a term that sounds attractive, but in reality, as it is invisible it’s difficult to measure it. There are also many behavioural challenges that make it difficult to calculate energy efficiency. “It’s an intangible asset and you only own the asset, you don’t operate it,” Kumar points out. In an inverter, solar rooftop project or in a generator, one can calculate how many units have been used, but in energy efficiency, whether the energy has been saved or not is a matter that has to be agreed upon between the customer and the supplier.

“Today we have replaced 3.4 million streetlights in the country. EESL is the largest streetlight owning company in the world; nobody manages so many assets within just seven years, like we have done. Yes, Philips may have done much more, but that was based on the supply model,” Kumar says.

The business model - India vs the world