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Are Rural Customers Ready to Consume More Energy at the Right Price? New Mini-Grid Research Offers Intriguing Results
Setting appropriate pricing is crucial to any business, but it's especially challenging for mini-grid developers serving rural customers in emerging countries. If the price is too high, customers can’t afford to buy enough power. If it's too low, mini-grids risk their commercial viability. Authors at CrossBoundary discuss a new report exploring the impact of massive price reductions on energy consumption and mini-grid revenues. The results are striking, and potentially significant for both providers and their customers.
- Categories
- Energy
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PAYGo Solar at a Crossroads: Why the Industry Must Choose Between Protecting Customers and Satisfying Investors
Over $500 million in investor financing has poured into off-grid solar in the past year. But while that's an exciting development for the sector, there is a downside. As BrightLife CEO Stefan Grundmann explains, PAYGo solar operators are facing heightened investor pressure to expand their reach and aggressively deliver greater sales. In response, many companies have taken new measures to boost business – some of which have led to troubling new risks for customers. Grundmann explores this issue, and how the industry and its investors should respond to it.
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Bridging the ‘Off-Grid/On-Grid’ Divide: How Grid Integration Can Build the Energy System of the Future
The cost of solar modules has dropped by over 80% since 2009, and it’s estimated that the world’s solar power capacity will triple by 2022, driven in part by off-grid energy. Yet without an effort to make connections between off-grid systems and national grids, the growing global movement toward mini-grid solutions cannot reach its potential, says Tatiana Bessarabova at Endeva. She explores how Endeva, SOLshare and other players in the energy sector are working to make grid integration a reality in Bangladesh.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
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Ceramics in Global Development: How an Affordable, Overlooked Technology Could Spark a Micro-Scale Industrial Revolution
In the developing world, diseases caused by polluted air and contaminated water claim millions of lives. Yet initiatives to distribute clean cookstoves and water filters have often struggled to bring affordable solutions to poor communities. According to Reid Harvey at TAM Ceramics, both filters and cookstoves can be inexpensively produced with an unexpected technology: ceramics. He explores how a breakthrough in ceramic science and design, combined with a focus on local production and distribution, could boost entrepreneurship while delivering life-changing products to the poor.
- Categories
- Energy
- Tags
- global development, SDGs
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Putting Energy to Work: Community and Business Partnerships for Sustainable Local Futures
Most attempts to create energy access without considering its social impact will simply end up as a checked box on a list, without moving the needle on any of the SDGs, writes Saurabh Biswas, a PhD candidate at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability. He explores a new study where researchers were embedded with companies and non-profits in Nepal, the Philippines, Uganda and Bolivia. The research points to the value of “multi-dimensional partnerships” that bring together not only energy companies and consumers, but other diverse stakeholders.
- Categories
- Energy
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Adapt or Die: Accelerating Growth Amid a Rapidly Changing Energy Landscape
The clean cooking sector has made incredible strides in the past decade, with bilateral organizations and the development community working together to create standardized environmental impact goals. Now the industry is facing a new set of scaling challenges, say Jessica Alderman and Ron Bills of Envirofit International. The two share advice for enterprises seeking to level up, including how to avoid mission creep.
- Categories
- Energy, Social Enterprise
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Freeing the Data to Build the Off-Grid Energy Sector: A Case Study from Tanzania
Mini-grids and solar home systems are showing promise in many parts of Tanzania and other countries. But Christopher Arderne at the World Bank and Pepukaye Bardouille at the IFC flag a key challenge: Lack of coordination and information-sharing between government and the private sector means off-grid developers may target sites that will become grid-connected before they can recover their investments. Arderne and Bardouille share some free new data tools that blend local participation and infrastructure mapping to help off-grid players avoid this risk.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
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Why Health Benefits Could Drive Customer Value for Solar Lighting and Clean Cookstoves
Solar lighting and improved cookstoves have multiple benefits. But according to a new FINCA International survey of end-users in Uganda, the benefits customers value most involve the products' perceived contributions to a cleaner, healthier household. Scott Graham and Anahit Tevosyan at FINCA explore how highlighting these benefits can help product manufacturers and distributors – and the donors and investors who support them – to strengthen the uptake and usage of off-grid products.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
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