Self-Sustaining Community for a Green Future—A Case Study

India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and the demand for energy is ever increasing. Traditionally, the majority of the energy demand in India is met by fossil fuels. India, being the second most populous country in the world naturally the demand for automobiles is high. The reliance on fossil fuels for generating electricity coupled with large number of automobiles contributes heavily toward emission of greenhouse gases, thereby polluting the air in most of the metropolitan cities. To overcome the reliance on fossil fuels, the past decade saw heavy investments being made by both government and private sector to generate clean and green energy using renewable sources like solar and wind energy. Today, India is the fastest growing renewable energy market in the world. In order to tackle the emissions from vehicles, the government has adopted many policies to encourage the buying and usage of electric vehicles (EV). The electric vehicle, can be “truly non-polluting” only if the energy that is used to charge the battery is generated from a non-polluting source like solar or wind energy. If everyone in the country switches to EVs, the greenhouse gases emissions and the resulting air pollution would drastically come down. On the contrary, it may turn out to be very difficult to generate and supply the amount of energy needed to charge all those EVs. Hence, it calls for distributed generation at the community level. The climate in most parts of India is very conducive for generating electricity using solar energy and some parts of the country receive adequate solar and wind energy, one such place is Chitradurga, Karnataka. This paper proposes generation of electricity using solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) placed on the rooftop of the building to meet both household and vehicular energy demand of the occupants. Making the community completely self-sustained and contributing to a green future.