The thrilling potential for offgrid solar energy Amar Inamdar
There’s something
really incredible happening.
So there’s over a billion people
who have no access to energy
whatsoever across the world,
620 million of them here in Africa.
It costs about 1,500 dollars to connect
each household up to the grid.
If you are going to wait for it,
it takes about nine years, on average,
and that feels like a lifetime
when you’re trying to make that happen.
That’s kind of unbelievable,
and it’s also unacceptable.
So let’s do something about it.
The lightbulb comes from this idea
that you have an energy system
that’s made up of the ideas of Tesla
and the ideas of Thomas Edison.
There was an evolution that said
it’s not just about the lightbulb,
it’s about the whole system,
the whole energy system
that goes with that lightbulb,
and what happened in that gilded age
was the creation of an industrial system
that every country around the world
has now started to emulate.
So to get to the appliances,
you need to have power stations.
From power stations,
you need to have infrastructure,
and that infrastructure takes you
to the point of having electricity,
and you get to the lightbulbs
and the appliances
that we all take for granted.
But the amazing thing, in a way,
is that there’s a revolution happening
in the villages and towns
all around us here in East Africa.
And the revolution is an echo
of the cell phone revolution.
It’s wireless,
and that revolution is about solar
and it’s about distributed solar.
Photons are wireless,
they fall on every rooftop,
and they generate enough power
to be sufficient for every household need.
So that’s an incredible thing.
There’s also a problem with it.
Up until now, the technology
hasn’t been there to make it happen,
and the mindset has been
that we have to have the grid
to provide industrial growth
and let countries develop
and create jobs and industrialize.
So we’ve gotten ourselves to the point
where actually the costs
of building these grids
and following that pattern of development
are really unsustainable.
If you add up the deficits
that all of the utilities run in Africa,
sub-Saharan Africa,
you get to a number
of 21 billion dollars every year
to maintain that system and keep it going.
So an extraordinary amount of resources
that’s been put in to creating a system
that ultimately we will have
to wait a very long time for,
and when it comes,
it often doesn’t come
with sufficient robustness
to allow us to go down
that path to development.
So what a shame.
But here’s what’s happening,
and here’s the opportunity that I think
we should all get excited about.
So there’s a group of companies
that have been chipping away
at this problem over the last 10 years,
and this group of companies
have recognized the reality
that there’s a great big nuclear reactor
up there in the sky,
and that Africa is more endowed
with that solar power
that comes from the sky, the sun,
than almost any other continent.
So the opportunity has come
to convert some of that solar power,
wireless power, into energy
at the household level.
And three things have happened
at the same time.
First, the costs of solar
productivity have come down.
So putting a panel on your roof
and generating power from it,
that cost has absolutely collapsed
over the last 30 years,
and it’s gone down by 95 percent.
Second, the appliance network.
So the group of appliances
that we’ve all gotten used to,
we all want and we all need,
we all see as part of our everyday lives
that give us health and security,
those appliances have come down in cost.
So if you take the LED lightbulb,
for example, a very simple thing,
they’re now 85 percent less
than they were five years ago,
and their efficiency, when you
compare them to an incandescent bulb,
like the lightbulb I showed
in the previous slide,
is incredible.
They give you 10 times
the amount of light,
and they last 30 times as long.
And then the last thing that’s happened
is of course the cell phone revolution,
so we’re piggybacking
off the cell phone revolution,
and we can now make decentralized
customers make small payments
for bits of equipment and appliances
where actually they’re now affordable.
We can pay them off
over a daily or a weekly schedule.
So this is an incredible change
in the economy that’s happening,
and it’s really opened up
something very, very innovative.
So I’m going to introduce you
to a lady I met with last week.
Her name’s Susan.
It may not look like it,
but Susan is a representative
of a $27 billion market.
27 billion dollars is what people
like Susan spend every year
on cell phone charging,
flashlight batteries and kerosene
to light their homes.
So Susan is a proud owner
of a small solar system.
It’s a kit rather than a planetary thing,
so a small solar system,
and her small solar system
allows her to have a couple of lightbulbs,
and she’s made this transition,
this jump, from kerosene into light.
She has four or five lights and a radio.
It’s fantastic, and she talks about it.
She talks about her kids doing homework
at night because she has light.
I’m not sure what
the kids feel about that.
She talks about the fact that she can
go out at 4am and look after the cows,
and she’s not so worried,
but also, with a little
twinkle in her eye,
she talks about how light
turns her house into a home at night.
She’s not scared
of her own house at night,
because it has light in it,
and I thought that was amazing.
So Susan does something
that many customers of these companies
that I talked about do,
and she forces us to innovate.
She challenges companies, saying,
“I’ve got the radio and the lights.
You know what? I’d like a TV.
I’d like to entertain,
educate me and my kids.
And then I would like to have
some hair clippers for my kids,
you know, to cut my kids' hair,
and I’d love to have a fridge.
And she’s coined something
that the energy world
is really hungry to do.
The idea that she’s coined
is the energy ladder.
It starts, again, with a lightbulb. Right?
And the lightbulb is an idea
that we can get our kids to do homework,
and very cheap, about five dollars,
and we can get it distributed.
But then let’s go up from there.
This is the kit that Susan has:
four lightbulbs, radio,
maybe a little flashlight,
a little solar panel on the roof.
And then let’s go up again.
We can get maybe at about 500 dollars,
the previous kit was maybe $150,
again, paid for over time,
two years to pay it all off,
you can get the TV,
so the lightbulbs and the TV.
And you start to ask yourself,
“So where is this headed?”
Is this headed here,
where we can have distributed systems
with the right infrastructure
to provide power
for our hospitals and our schools?
And really how far can this go?
And this is the mindset shift
that I think is really exciting.
How far can we go?
Could it get up to here?
You know, this is the conceptual design
for one of the world’s biggest factories,
designed to be fully solar-powered
and fully off grid.
Maybe we can get that.
So there’s a generation of these companies
that are out there doing this work
and creating thousands of jobs,
creating, selling, tens of thousands
of these solar systems,
so bringing tens of thousands
of families into light,
and tackling that big $1 billion problem
that I talked about at the beginning,
and really innovating.
And what they’re doing is,
they’re not only energy companies,
they’re also credit finance companies,
so they’re bringing
people into an economy.
They’re retail companies,
so they’re taking products out
to people in the connecting markets.
And they’re appliance companies,
so they’re developing
extraordinary products
that are very efficient and very cheap.
So an extraordinary thing
is happening out there
that’s worth recognizing.
And where does it take us?
From a governmental perspective,
from a social perspective,
it takes us out to two really big goals.
We aspire towards
energy access for everybody,
and we aspire towards
a fully-functioning low-carbon economy.
And we’re getting to the point
where we’re seeing
the fully-functioning low-carbon economy
is not just about
getting people onto the grid,
it’s about getting people onto electricity
and doing it in a way
that’s really dignified.
So I want us all
to picture it for a moment,
really picture what this could mean:
[New energy ecosystem]
an energy system that’s not
just about subsistence power,
getting the family off the kerosene,
but it’s actually the full suite
of appliances and tools
and productivity
that we’ve all gotten used to,
so actually energy at a scale
that can drive industrial development.
And it’s the ability to have
powerful tools.
It’s the ability to be productive
in the households, as a farmer,
or as a carpenter or as a tailor
and get your businesses to work
and bring you into the economy.
And I was working again
a couple of days ago with a farmer
just outside of Nairobi, small field,
and he has an irrigation pump
that’s run off solar,
and he was bragging about
how much of a difference it made
to his productivity.
When we were listening to him,
we were asking ourselves,
at what point will it be
that actually, you will be charging
an electric scooter off your rooftop
and taking your crops to market
with mobility that you’ve charged
yourself, using your own power?
And that’s an extraordinary thing
that’s happening,
and if you listen to Susan and Francis,
you get to this point where you say,
“These guys have
this extraordinary sense of dignity
about the way they’re
achieving their power,
the sense of ownership
and the sense of pride,
and I’m going to flip
into a little tiny video clip,
which is from a distributor of one
of these companies that I’m talking about.
And he puts it better
than anyone I’ve ever heard it.
So just listen to this.
Martin: So if it does happen
that we get to a point
where every home has their own
independent supply of energy,
that will give us the democracy of energy.
That’s it.
And everybody has that choice,
and everybody knows
when they want to switch it on or off,
whether they want to sell access
or whether they want to store it.
That freedom getting back
into the hands of the consumer,
that would be the most exciting thing.
Amar Inamdar: Brilliant, right?
That was Martin,
and he has a really
wonderful turn of phrase,
and what a sense of vision
that he captures.
So picture that for a moment:
every household a proud producer
as well as consumer of energy …
the ability to generate power,
to share power, to sell power,
all coming from your own generating asset
sitting on your own property.
Maybe even think about
crowdsourcing with your neighbors
the grid from the ground up,
rather than waiting for the government
to bring it from the top down.
So in Africa, we have this
extraordinary opportunity right now,
an extraordinary opportunity,
to change the world
and create an energy system
that everybody will be jealous of,
and everybody will look to us
as the innovators of.
And that’s the democracy of energy.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: Quick question.
So it’s a really exciting vision.
Help us understand,
what are the key roadblocks right now?
Like, what could make this go faster?
AI: So the first one, I think, is really
the intermittency of solar power.
So the problem is that the sun
only shines for 12 hours a day,
so you’ve got darkness for 12 hours a day,
and we need to have storage solutions
that are better to help us
take us down that path.
So storage is really one.
CA: And those prices are coming down.
AI: And those prices
are coming down very quickly.
Second, the appliance set.
So it needs to get more efficient,
and it needs to get more diverse.
We need to do more of the things
we in Africa want to do
with the appliance set.
CA: DC appliances.
AI: DC appliances,
and I think there’s a real
opportunity there, Chris.
I think the opportunity
is that we could shift some of these
21 billion dollars of subsidies
that governments are spending
on the current electricity system
and we could promote R&D here in Africa
to create some of these products,
to be some of these entrepreneurs,
and make this happen.
So create this new system here.
CA: And some of the companies themselves,
I mean, there’s plenty of demand there.
What’s holding them back
from supplying that demand?
I mean, some of them talk about,
they would like to sell 10x
what they can currently sell.
AI: Exactly. So for many
of these capitals,
it’s that markets don’t price
consumer risk very well,
and particularly in markets like ours,
in emerging markets and here in Africa.
So there’s not enough working capital
coming into this space
because the big financiers
look at this space and say,
“I don’t know how to price that risk,
so I’m going to stay away from it.”
And that’s holding
a lot of these companies back.
CA: Well, it’s incredibly exciting
to picture what could happen here.
In my mind, this might be
the biggest leapfrog of them all.
And thank you for all you’re doing
and for sharing that vision
so powerfully.