Solar installation startup Zunroof is turning electricity bills to almost nil

Zunroof, a solar installation company, has a unique model to offer -- it turns household electricity bills all free.

Launched in April 2016 by two IIT-Kharagpur graduates, Pranesh Chaudhary and Sushant Sachan, the platform has managed to achieve the electricity solution by providing Solar PhotoVoltaic (PV) solution to urban home owners in Delhi (NCR).

“For an urban household in Delhi-NCR, which consumes an average of 9000-10,000 units of electricity every year, our 6 kilowatt (kw) solar panel system will turn their electricity bills zero in three years,” said Chaudhary.

Unit-economics

He explained that 1 kw of solar panel produces around 1500 units of electricity every year, which means that 6kw of system produces 9000 units in one year. Thus, the number of units produce equals to the number of units consumed.

A 6kw of solar system initially costs around Rs 4 lakh. However, after subsidy of Rs 1.5 lakh the total bill cuts to Rs 2.5 lakh. Based on the current unit-economics, the whole solar panel system becomes free in three years.

“The capital investment in installing solar PV system has a payback period of three to four years and with output warranties for 25 years,” said Chaudhary.

Concept of Zunroof

Considering India’s climate, solar power is a perfectly feasible source of energy for the country. It receives about 2,300-3,200 hours of sunshine every year, which is an incidence of 4-7 kWh/m2 of solar energy, enough to meet consumption requirements. With the ever-increasing prices and decreasing stocks of fossil fuels, solar power seems to be the best option.

After graduating from IIT-Kharagpur, Chaudhary and Sachan joined analytical consulting and solar sector, respectively.

However, after some time, they felt they were being too comfortable with their jobs. So they decided to take up more challenging work and thought of building a company using their respective skills. Thus, the team of two joined solar and analytics and built Zunroof.

It is a home-tech company, powered by a mix of image processing, VR, IoT and data analytics. It has developed proprietary tools that predict accurate size and design of the system as well as all techno-economic feasibility metrics of the roof within minutes.

Besides, through its platform, it also provides the best prices and the right quality options to its customers through multiple installer partners.

The company claims to have assessed over 20,000 rooftop customers and has crossed installations of over 1 megawatt of solar panels.

It also claims to be unit-economics profitable in Delhi-NCR and now aims to expand to other regions such as Agra, Faizabad, Chandigarh, Haridwar and Jaipur.

Market opportunity

India’s solar power generation capacity has more than tripled in three years to over 12 gigawatt (GW).

According to a recent report by Bridge to India (a consulting firm in India’s renewable market), India will have a capacity addition of 8.8 GW projected this year. The country is set to become the third biggest solar market globally in 2017 and is expected overtake Japan.

The report reveals that solar capacity in the country is expected to touch 18.7 GW by the end of 2017, which is about 5 per cent of global solar capacity. Besides, the government is targeting to raise energy generation from all renewable sources to 175 GW by 2022.

Oorjan, Nuevosol, Ultimate Sun Systems and Ezysolare, among others are some of the startups which are offering solutions in the solar space.

Experts say that companies see huge business opportunity in solar power generation as the government promotes the renewable energy with tax breaks.