SharedSolar has been selected as a finalist in the 2013 Vodafone challenge. It’s an honor, and we’re in the company of some amazing innovations and innovators, past and present. It was great to meet fellow finalists, organizers and judges at the Vodafone xone in San Francisco, centered around the theme of “Mobile for Good – enabling mobile technology to deliver social change.”

It’s worth noting how the Mobile/IT revolution has been instrumental for us in providing a grid-like electric service with intermittent renewables. Our on-site servers run on processors designed for mobile phones – low cost, low power, less heat. The IT hardware costs are negligible with the addition of these platforms, but the flexibility we can bring with our hosted software is huge. We provide customer service by leveraging the existing mobile network infrastructure, with mobile handsets as the interface between customers and the operators. Wireless LAN’s support our mobile app that local agents use for payment collection, management and local overrides. Our enterprise management system also uses the mobile network infrastructure for communicating with the sites.

Without these mobile computing and communications platforms, it would not have been possible for us to deploy and operate sustainable electric services in the regions and communities that we are in. And we’re extremely happy and excited to have been given this chance to participate and showcase our solutions.

More on the announcement and the challenge here - http://www.vodafone-us.com/wireless-innovation-project/current-competition/2013-finalists/

The past 1st of March 2012, SharedSolar participated in the consultation on the Sahel organized by the United Nations and the MDG Centre for West and Central Africa in Dakar. Together with experts from universities in the Sahel countries we provided our vision to achieve economic development, address the needs of marginalized groups and exploit sustainably shared resources in this fragile region. See previous post on the Sahel here. At SharedSolar we believe that our platform and approach is a key solution to enable energy services for agriculture and productive uses that are badly needed in the Sahel. We are currently looking for partners interested in the scale up of our  mini-grid technology services in this and other regions.

Past resources:

See the micro-site of the First Africa Drylands Week held in Dakar in June 2011

Depository of the MDG Centre for West and Central Africa

The SharedSolar platform is different to other electrification technology. We actually take a bottom-up approach and build over our experience in Sub-saharan Africa and research at Modi Labs for infrastructure planning and ‘big data’ visualisation. Below you can see a snap-shot of the software showing rich contextual information for our Sites in Senegal and Mali.

In the photo above shows the results of our scoping survey to analyse wheter or not a micro-grid makes sense depending of costing factors. Here we have mapped the villages connected to the grid. (Oui!, the results can  be easily shown in multiple languages also).

In the photo below, you can see the quality of monitoring and O&M a field staff can do. Here we are filtering the information collected for the number of exterior lights installed on each household. This reporting tool help us to track the physical changes in the sites over time and to verify that againts demand and consumption reports from chargers, inverters and individual meters.  It help us also to check that our staff is passing to provide service (in this case, Bakary, the manager of our sites in Mali, visited the household at 15hr on 18-09-2012).

In fact this tool has been so powerful that Bakary is supporting the needs of over 170 clients in only 2 days per week. Since april 2012 all the high level supervision has been remotely in our sites in Mali as the country suffered a Coup d’Etat and much of the support staff was evacauted to Senegal. Hower, we receive automated reports and  near real time  data from every meter connected (we can modulate the frequency of reporting as to save connectivity costs). So we make sure everyone connected to SharedSolar has the best service available.

Ice making and lots of it is the result of a recent introduction of freezer units at SharedSolar sites in Mali.  The ice making is a very promising activity for women and youth groups that normally have difficulties directly engaging in income-generating activities.  The SharedSolar project pre-financed two freezers (around 500 USD each) using the initial connection fees paid by the costumers.  The community health workers (CHW) association in the village of Dioro Titin manage the freezer associated with that SharedSolar site.  The women’s association manages the freezer in Tiby 2 SharedSolar site. Both groups are participating in a trial period where they are testing the business model while the project leaders are studying the profitability and energy use.  This trial period is also necessary to develop the market demand and the supply chain required.

Ice is not new to Dioro.  Previously, a shop owner in the nearby town of Dioro (7km away) would buy ice from Segou (60km away).  The CHW group, mainly composed of young males, have arranged for this shop owner to now buy all the ice production that the CHW group can support.  Each 1kg ice bar is being sold at 100FCFA (around 20 USD cents).  The CHW group will use the income generated to top up their fund and buy tools and medicine for the village.

The women at Tiby 2 have taken an innovative business approach to profit off their leased freezer.  Their business model centers around making small sweet drinks (around 250ml) that they freeze and then sell in neighboring villages via other women.  Packages of three such frozen drinks are sold at wholesale for 50 FCFA (around 10 USD cents).  The women group can make more than 8,000 FCFA (16 USD) per batch produced in this way.  Therefore, this activity benefits many women in very remote and poor villages.

Not all of this has gone perfectly though.  Some of the early problems found center around the quality of the plastic bags used as they easily break and tear.  To address this concern, the group will try both better quality plastic bags and implementing the use of some racks and trays to avoid breakages due to weight.  A second problem faced by the women’s group is the lack of basic accounting skills to consistently and accurately track expenses and income.  In collaboration with the MVP business development and education units the project will seek to reinforce the capacity of this women group to do so.  SharedSolar technicians will train the treasurer so she can consult the group’s electricity balance with their mobile phone for more accurate account keeping.

The next steps for the project include exploring the feasibility of installing freezer units in other SharedSolar sites and how to repeat the success of the women’s group and .  Training for health and safety will also be provided by the MVP site.  More updates on these and other income generating activities with SharedSolar power to follow.

Sharedsolar is a great example of how software can transform otherwise static infrastructure into one that can deliver a flexible, dynamic and easy-to-manage service, for both the provider and the consumer. Deploying micro-grids combining generation, storage and metering technologies – as we do in SharedSolar – is one approach towards bringing immediate service to the populace. Because of the distributed nature of the sites and the subscriber base, it is important that:

• from the operator standpoint, the assets deployed and service provided are managed efficiently with minimal downtime. An emphasis should be placed here on the design of modular systems to allow for later expansion and possible grid connection.
• from the consumer standpoint, they are provided with a high-quality service and the flexibility to pay for it when they are able to.

At the Modi Research Group, we’ve been continually improving our software platforms to address these concerns. Our software solutions consist of two major components:

• the Gateway – a web portal providing operator dashboards for the remote management of the sites. Aside from providing valuable insights into the operations, it also serves as the conduit between customers and the service over the mobile networks. Another key feature is the token management system crucial for tracking revenue collection, that could conceptually be tied-in with 3rd party services like mobile banking.
• the local intelligence – a software application residing at each Sharedsolar site and responsible for near real-time metering of each circuit, consumer credit accounting, aggregated log transmissions to the Gateway, alert mechanisms (system health, consumer credit and consumption), load/energy management and so on. It also provides the messaging interfaces for the Gateway to access the sites, web UI’s for local technicians to troubleshoot over and web service API’s for our local vendor solution using Android devices.

Distributed generation warrants distributed intelligence. Especially when the sources are intermittent renewables like solar (or hydro, or wind), it is important to manage the demand based on how much was generated. This requires data to be passed regularly between the metering devices and the management software, and an interesting question arises about where the service responsibilities should lie. In settings with high-bandwidth, reliable (perhaps, IP-based) communication links, it might make more sense to have the intelligence situated at a central location, away from the sites. This is especially so from the software release/maintenance/control perspectives. In the absence of this communications infrastructure, it becomes imperative to shift a lot of the service responsibilities towards the sites themselves, as we’ve had to do in SharedSolar. Even the model of prepayment is affected by this decision; we’re able to provide pay-as-you-go simply because the accounting happens at the site and does not depend on data transmissions over an expensive and lossy channel (if we can call it that) such as SMS. A positive side-effect of having a high-level, software management system at the sites is the possibility it introduces of deploying standalone [smart] micro-grids.

It is also interesting to note how high-level software languages and frameworks (we use Twisted for local/distributed management and the Gateway is built using Pyramid) – same as those used to develop online services – can be leveraged to build these management systems. The ability to perform system integration with new hardware and add new service features like the Webmin and the web API’s for the local vendor devcies have been absolutely invaluable as we learn and adapt to situations on the ground. And I’m convinced that this would have been impossible within budget/time constraints if it were done at a level closer to the hardware (microcontrollers, low-level code etc.) More on this in a following blog post.

The director of the MVP project, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs visited the MVP Segou site on the 11^th and 12^th of January 2012, to launch the second phase of the MVP project in Mali including a briefing of the SharedSolar systems. Mali’s Prime Minister Mrs. Mariam Cissé Kaïdama Sidibé, kindly accepted the invitation of the MVP project to set the first stone of a modern highschool that will serve the municipalities of Dioro and Farakoumassa. In addition to classrooms, the school will have a boarding residence, dining hall, sports field, a management facility, housing for teachers and will be powered by renewable energy. This project has been made possible by the generous donation of Mr Renzo Rosso, CEO of the fashion house Diesel. Professor Sachs was accompained by his wife Sonia and the famous singer of U2, Bono.

The Millennium Village Project (MVP) was launched in 2005 in order to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals in the poorest regions of rural Africa. A dozen clusters of villages in 10 African countries have adopted bold and novel strategies to overcome poverty, hunger, and disease.  Now halfway through the ten-year project, the results are very exciting: agriculture production is up significantly, free basic health care is in place, malaria is coming under control, many more children are in school, and farmers are organizing cooperatives to diversify their crops and increase incomes.

The core idea of the project is that poor rural communities can take on several initiatives simultaneously in a strategy that is sometimes called “integrated development.” In the case of the Millennium Villages, five areas of community life are prioritized: agriculture, health, education, infrastructure, and business development.

After the ceremony, the PM visited the community health center of Dioro. The delegation then took the opportunity to discuss with a women’s group in charge of parboiled rice production and with the SharedSolar team in charge of rural electrification in the area.

SharedSolar is an electrification approach developed at Columbia University that utilizes a network of micro-grids, each controlled with a unique prepaid metering system that leverages existing mobile telephony systems. Through remote management, automated electricity dispatching and proximity to clients, the cost to provide energy services is drastically reduced when compared to traditional methods. Smart meters and proprietary software allow operators to measure low consumption loads typical of poor rural areas, whilst renewable energy produced by modular systems provides flexibility and even a path towards eventual grid connectivity. With a pay-as-you-go business model, SharedSolar enables customers to make frequent and small payments that fits their energy needs. Users buy scratch cards to recharge accounts via their mobile phone or approach a local vendor equipped with a wireless terminal.

In Mali nine SharedSolar systems already benefit over 2,400 people in 172 households. During the first half of 2012, a collaboration between Mali’s Rural Electrification and Household Energy Agency (AMADER) and Millennium Promise Alliance will install an additional 11 kW of photovoltaic equipment for 160 new households. SharedSolar in Segou is leading the way for similar future extensions to other parts of the country.  Elsewhere, SharedSolar is developing programs in Uganda, Kenya and Haiti.

In a dinner offered by the Government of the Region of Segou and the Ministry of the Integrated Development of the Zone Office du Niger, Prof. Sachs stressed the commitment of the MVP project to continue support innovative actions that improve access to health, education and energy.

Dr Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

Here are some pictures from the recent commissioning in Nyaktunda.  Also a video of the SMS training…

Two of a planned five systems are now installed in the Nyaktunda trading center.  The first is powering several schools and a nearby home, the other is in a market, powering nearby shops and an apartment complex.  Pictures below show the two sites.

Jeff Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary General and author of many books including The End of Poverty, visited the Uganda SharedSolar installation Sunday July 16th.  Below is a picture of Jeff as well as the CEO of JM Eagle (who donated a few hundred kilometers of pipe to the MVP for a water project, and Vijay Modi.  Pius and Innocent are showing them the new “Vendor App” on the SharedSolar tablets.

Below is another picture of Matt Basinger and Jeff as Matt describes how the SharedSolar system works in Ruhiira.

Two sites in Nyaktunda and one in Nyarushanje are underway.  Shed Construction started this week with the foundation being dug and concrete being poured.