In India, over 3% or close to 6 million tonnes of milk gets wasted yearly due to unreliable electricity supply. Poor quality of milk due to infrastructural challenges causes a loss of income for farmers. Other challenges include high transportation costs and the time needed for delivering the milk to the nearest milk chilling centre. Adopting solar-based and efficient chilling technology solutions can help increase production efficiency and reduce wastage in the supply chain and can play a crucial role in making the transformation possible. To minimize waste, milk needs to be cooled at the source to increase its shelf life. To provide refrigeration and because of erratic energy supply, milk producers largely depend on diesel generators (DG), which makes the cooling process expensive and leads to carbon emissions.
The Climate Solutions Partnership is a five-year philanthropic collaboration between WWF-India, the World Resources Institute, HSBC, and a network of local partners to scale climate solutions. One of the goals we hope to achieve together is to accelerate the energy transition for India's booming dairy sector towards low-carbon, with a specific focus on the cold chain segment of the value chain.
Presently, we are working across the two largest milk-producing states, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan where 30 decentralized solar photovoltaic (PV) systems (including battery storage) have been installed. With a combined chilling capacity of 110 kilowatt 'peak' (kWp) these help preserve over 17,000 litres of milk per day.
Watch the film to learn how we hope to empower the next white revolution.