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Its pilot plants were profitable within six months, so its model is sustainable.Įmergence BioEnergy takes this approach a step farther.

Consumers pay door-to-door collectors upfront for power, and Husk collects a 30% government subsidy for construction costs. It hopes to extend its coverage to 50 mini-grids during 2010. Co-founded three years ago by a local electrical engineer, Gyanesh Pandey, Husk has established five mini-grids in Bihar, India's poorest state, where rice is a staple crop. Wires are strung on cheap, easy-to-repair bamboo poles to provide power to around 600 families for each generator. Husk Power Systems, an Indian firm, uses second-world-war-era diesel generators fitted with biomass gasifiers that can use rice husks, which are otherwise left to rot, as a feedstock. One idea is to use locally available biomass as a feedstock to generate power for a village-level “micro-grid”. Much of the ferment in bottom-up energy entrepreneurialism is focusing on South Asia, where 570m people in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, mostly in rural areas, have no access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. It is not just new technology that is needed, but new models. So there is scope for further improvement. But the price would have to fall below $5 to make it universally affordable, according to a study by the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank. D.light's most basic solar lantern costs $10. His firm has developed a range of solar-powered systems that can provide up to 12 hours of light after charging in sunlight for one day. “There are hundreds of millions who can afford clean energy, but there is still a barrier for the billions who cannot,” says Sam Goldman, the chief executive of D.light. That would have a number of benefits: families in the developing world may spend as much as 30% of their income on kerosene, and kerosene lighting causes indoor air pollution and fires.īut such systems are still beyond the reach of the very poorest. “This could eliminate kerosene lighting in the next ten years, the way cellphones took off in about 13 years,” says Richenda Van Leeuwen of the Energy Access Initiative at the UN Foundation in Washington, DC. Solar cells can be used to power low-energy LEDs, which are both energy-efficient and cheap: the cost of a set of LEDs to light a home has fallen by half in the past decade, and is now below $25. Prices of solar cells have also fallen, so that the cost per kilowatt is half what it was a decade ago. This illustrates both the growing interest in bottom-up solutions and falling prices. At the “Lighting Africa” conference in Nairobi in May, a World Bank project to encourage private-sector solutions for the poor, 50 lighting firms displayed their wares, up from just a handful last year.

Start with lighting, which prompted the establishment of the first electrical utilities in the rich world. “Companies need to come up with innovative business models and technology.” Fortunately, lots of people are doing just that. “We need to reinvent how energy is delivered,” says Simon Desjardins, who manages a programme at the Shell Foundation that invests in for-profit ways to deliver energy to the poor. The developing world has an opportunity to leapfrog the centralised model, just as it leapfrogged fixed-line telecoms and went straight to mobile phones.īut just as the spread of mobile phones was helped along by new business models, such as pre-paid airtime cards and village “telephone ladies”, new approaches are now needed. In the rich world, in fact, the trend is towards a more flexible system of distributed, sustainable power sources. Local, bottom-up systems may be more sustainable and produce fewer carbon emissions than centralised schemes. The technology in question, from solar panels to low-energy light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is rapidly falling in price. There is no need to wait for politicians or utilities to act. But why wait for top-down solutions? Providing energy in a bottom-up way instead has a lot to recommend it.