News

Prospect, CLASP & Global Energy Alliance partner to support productive-use appliance expansion

We are excited to partner with CLASP, an international NGO, and the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet Inc. (Global Energy Alliance), to support expanding the use of energy-efficient, income-generating appliances in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The collaboration will see the customisation of Prospect as dMRV platform for CLASP and the Global Energy Alliance’s Productive Use Financing Facility (the Financing Facility) 2.0, a catalytic initiative that increases access to energy-efficient, income-generating appliances across Africa. The $6.1m Financing Facility 2.0 expansion builds on a successful two-year pilot, proving the market for productive-use appliances. It will support businesses, farmers, and communities in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Kenya to acquire up to 10,000 energy-efficient productive use appliances – such as solar fridges, pumps, and mills – through grants, subsidies, and technical support.

Prospect will significantly accelerate eligibility verification through automated checks against e.g. system and customer data, and sales and installation records. Custom dashboards will provide real-time tracking of sales and installation status, remote monitoring of systems, and display program impact metrics – such as income generated, customers served, water pumped, and CO2e mitigated. This increases transparency, strengthens monitoring and evaluation, and allows for feedback loops to refine incentives.

We are proud to provide a robust, comprehensive dMRV platform to support CLASP and Global Energy Alliance’s efforts to mitigate CO2, strengthen agricultural value chains, and create green jobs across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Siena Hacker, Financing Facility project manager, says: “Prospect is integral to the Productive Use Financing Facility’s success as an effective results-based financing (RBF) program. Robust verification is the foundation of any RBF initiative, and Prospect provides us with greater confidence in the sales we support. By allowing us to track impact in real-time across multiple countries, the platform streamlines the verification process for CLASP and our participating companies alike.”

©Photo courtesy of CLASP

Media Contacts:

Thomas Duveau, Access to Energy Institute/Prospect: info@a2ei.org

Benson Kibiti, Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet: media@energyalliance.org

About A2EI

The Access to Energy Institute (A2EI) is a non-profit research and development institute dedicated to sustainable energy access and a just energy transition – focusing on local economic growth, improved livelihoods, climate action, and synergies among SDGs. We provide open-source data, software and financing solutions, on-the-ground research, prototype co-development and testing, and support pilot projects for scalable, affordable clean energy solutions.

About CLASP

CLASP is the leading global authority on efficient appliances in fighting climate change and improving people’s lives. An international NGO with 25 years of expertise and offices on four continents, CLASP collaborates with policymakers, industry leaders, and other experts to create a more sustainable future for people and the planet.

About the Global Energy Alliance

The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet Inc. (‘Global Energy Alliance’) builds transformative public, private, philanthropic partnerships to end energy poverty and accelerate green economic opportunity. Founded in 2021 by The Rockefeller Foundation, IKEA Foundation and Bezos Earth Fund, we work to unlock finance, strengthen institutions and transform markets, delivering progress that goes beyond individual projects to drive lasting systems change. Through our two interconnected global pillars, Grids of the Future – focused on innovation and infrastructure – and Energy and Opportunity – with a focus on jobs and livelihoods – we work toward our vision: a world where everyone has access to affordable, reliable, clean electricity and the means to use it to improve their lives.

With work in more than 30 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, our alliance aims to reach 1 billion people with clean electricity, prevent 4 billion tons of carbon emissions and create or improve 150 million jobs. For more information, please visit www.energyalliance.org and follow us on X at @EnergyAlliance. 

About the Productive Use Financing Facility

The Financing Facility is an innovative program that provides grants, subsidies, and technical assistance to suppliers and distributors to lower appliance prices and reach more customers. This makes it easier for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and households to buy energy-efficient technologies, such as solar water pumps, mills, and refrigerators, at favorable prices.

This program is supported by the Global Alliance for People and Planet.

For more information, read the Productive Use Financing Facility 2.0 press release, contact  financing@clasp.ngo, and follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates.

Technical Note #2 - Effect of AC Loads on Solar Generators

How can we prevent high failure rates of solar generators caused by AC loads? 

Issue 02 of our Technical Note is out! Our paper on the Effect of AC Loads on Solar Generators offers essential testing and recommendations for solar developers.

Key failures of solar systems often result from load-related issues, which we examined through high-resolution measurements of 20 common AC loads in Nigeria and their replication in our Berlin office. Our research shows that load behavior can vary significantly from power ratings, that 4 out of 5 inverters fail under certain stresses, and that some load scenarios pose long-term risks for inverter power electronics.

Key findings include:

1. Simple adoption in the gate drive circuitry can prevent fatal shootthroughs.
2. An adapted inrush current limiter can lower failure rates for 75% of the tested inverters while at the same time allowing for 20% more loads being successfully powered.

Our Recommendations to manufacturers:

During your next design iteration, put extra attention on

1. your overload protection – so it properly reacts to current transients;
2. your output voltage control speed – shouldn’t be slower than 200us;
3. adding an internal current limitation, if not already present;
4. your current gate drive circuit – a 2 cent component can save your product;
5. your DC link protection circuit.

Our Recommendations for distributors:

1. Consider adding inrush current limiters to your portfolio – it can boost customer satisfaction and lower your failure rate!
2. Do proper load assessments and be careful with nominal load ratings!

➡️  Please download the Technical Note Issue 02 here.

➡️  Want to learn more about preventing failure rates in solar generator design? Sign up for our Webinar here.

➡️  Missed Issue 01 of our Technical Note? Review it here.

Please feel free to contact us for more info!

New report on fossil fuel generator insights for Nigeria

Research demonstrates customer-centered solutions are crucial to facilitating Nigeria’s clean energy transition. With over 20 million fossil fuel generators in Nigeria contributing to enormous pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, noise, health risks, and high costs, modern solar-powered generators present a cleaner, quieter, and cost-effective alternative.

A new report by the Access to Energy Institute, Open Capital, and ZE-Gen highlights critical insights into replacing fossil fuel generators in Nigeria with modern solar solutions.

The report uses 12 months of smart meter data from fossil fuel generators monitored by Prospect, along with surveys from different customer categories. It reveals that while there is widespread interest in switching to solar, high upfront costs and inflexible financing remain significant barriers. It also emphasises the importance of flexible, data-driven design to accelerate solar adoption.

We encourage stakeholders in the off-grid solar sector to use our report and open source data to help:

✔️ Engineer data-driven, customer-centric solar products

✔️ Develop flexible financing models

✔️ Improve policy incentives for solar generator adoption

✔️ Leverage data transparency

Interested in learning more?

➡️ Download the A2EI report here.

➡️ Download the ZE-Gen summary report here.

➡️ Access the public Prospect dashboard here.

➡️ Watch the Webinar here.

➡️ Access the ZE-Gen press release here.

Please get in touch with us if you’re interested in full access to the data or to learn more. We’re excited to support the sector with transparent and reliable data to stop guessing and foster cross-industry collaborations for a just transition to renewables!

Research collaboration with KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Compared to other scientific fields, research on the topic of energy access in Sub Saharan Africa remains relatively limited and there are few comprehensive cooperations between energy access practitioners and academic institutions. Researchers often emphasise the lack of verified data from the sector as a missing ingredient.

The Access to Energy Institute and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm want to bridge that gap. The A2EI has started a cooperation with Francesco Fuso Nerini and Camilo Ramírez Gómez at KTH. Francesco works as associate professor at the KTH Division of Energy Systems, and is the director of the KTH Climate Action Centre, while Camilo is the lead researcher on Energy Access Modelling in the division.

The A2EI is putting a wide range of fully anonymised data of its open source data platform Prospect (http://prospect.energy) at the disposal of the research team headed by Francesco. The A2EI is facilitating access to aggregated and anonymised data between the researchers and the data owners through its Prospect platform.

The cooperation is starting with 2 master theses which will use the data to describe the effectiveness of results-based finance (RBF) programs in delivering energy access in line with SDG7. In addition, so-called energy-as-a-service models will be compared to RBF models to systematically derive their relative strengths and weaknesses.

By complementing the everyday experience of practitioners with scientific analysis based on verified, reliable data, we aim to contribute to new findings and learnings that will ultimately lead to faster, more sustainable electrification interventions.

2025 - year in review

As we approach the end of 2025, we wish to extend a sincere thank-you to our growing community of colleagues, partners, and supporters for your dedication, collaboration, and enthusiasm in pursuing data-driven, pragmatic solutions for SDG7! 

In keeping with tradition, we’ve prepared a brief year-in-review of the busy year at A2EI. Please take a look below!

We wish you all happy holidays and a wonderful start to a successful and Happy New Year. We are excited to continue our collaborations and look forward to the innovations and exciting projects that 2026 will bring in support of scaling energy access and achieving a just transition! 

Year in Review 2025

Prospect officially recognised as a digital public good

We are proud that Prospect has officially been recognised as a digital public good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).

This recognition reflects our commitment to open source, open access, digital solutions for inclusive development. It signifies Prospect is open, adoptable, aligned with privacy and other applicable best practices, and of high relevance for the achievement of the SDGs.

As a digital public good, Prospect is part of a growing ecosystem of open-source solutions supporting sustainable digital transformation. We are excited to collaborate with developers of diverse other digital public goods to address pressing challenges and advance energy access, energy transition, and climate action.

The Digital Public Goods Standard is a set of specifications and guidelines designed to maximise consensus about whether a digital solution conforms to the definition of a digital public good. More on the website of the DPGA: digitalpublicgoods.net

At the DPGA‘s Annual Members Meeting held in Brasilia in late November 2025, Prospect received significant interest, leading to the initiation of exciting new collaborations and alliances

Prospect bridging the “bankable data gap”

How can dMRV bridge the “bankable data gap”?

Across Africa’s fast-growing energy landscape, decision-makers face a persistent challenge: fragmented and unreliable data. The growing demand for real-time, verified insights to plan, finance and monitor sustainable energy solutions has revealed a clear “bankable data gap” – a need for trusted, interoperable and transparent systems capable of serving both public and private actors.

Prospect was designed to fill that gap.

Read more about how Prospect is advancing data-driven decision-making to support Africa’s clean energy future in the Alliance for Rural Electrification’s (ARE) recent newsletter.

COMESA adopting Prospect for ASCENT program

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) adopted Prospect as its digital monitoring, reporting and verification (dMRV) platform for the World Bank-funded Accelerating Sustainable and Clean Energy Access Transformation (ASCENT) program.

ASCENT, a pioneering USD 5 billion initiative, aims to reach 100 million people with clean energy across over 20 African countries by 2030. As the programs’ regional dMRV platform, Prospect consolidates data across project countries and phases and tracks progress in real time.

The COMESA ASCENT dMRV platform is specially tailored for the program, providing key features such as tracking technology adoption, benchmarking regional performance, and visualizing key indicators through intuitive dashboards.
It seamlessly integrates with national platforms and other data sources to monitor progress according to the result frameworks outlined in ASCENT financing agreements, offers clear visualizations of financial flows, and quantifies carbon emission reductions.

Tailored for various user roles, the platform supports differentiated access levels and scalable adoption – from basic dashboards to a wide range of program-specific views. The dMRV platform’s country dashboards deliver real-time data on electrification progress and results tracking and ensure transparency through independent verification.

During ASCENT Week 2025 in Lusaka, representatives from 20+ COMESA countries, The World Bank, and the energy sector discussed the implementation of the ASCENT program. We were pleased to conduct a training for ASCENT countries, guiding them on digitally reporting their progress within the program. Stakeholders from Burundi, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, Tanzania, and Zambia were trained on managing their countries’ customized reporting dashboards.

We are excited to digitally support this region-wide project, promoting transparency, data-driven decisions and collaboration among governments and financiers to bring clean energy to millions of households and businesses.

New report on clean cooking in Uganda

More than 98% of Ugandan households still rely on biomass and charcoal for cooking while only less than 1% use electricity as a primary cooking fuel. (WHO 2020)

The Ugandan government has made eCooking adoption a national priority and has set ambitious targets for its adoption. The Electricity Regulatory Authority implemented new e-cooking electricity subsidies, Uganda’s main customer-facing electricity distribution company Umeme distributed 1,500 electric pressure cookers (EPCs), and a national electric cooking strategy has been drafted.

The report “Findings from a Study on the Adoption of Electric Pressure Cookers in Uganda” involved gathering data from 500 households who had received an EPC from Umeme. The study, conducted over a period of 12 months, gathers data from surveys, smart meters, and household electricity billing. It focuses on understanding the effects of the adoption of EPCs on biomass fuel consumption, cooking time and labor, household electricity demand, as well as the relationship between appliance usage and electricity pricing.

The research was led by Elliot Avila from A2EI with funding from the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet. It was implemented in partnership with the Centre for Research in Energy and Energy Conservation at Makerere University in Kampala, in collaboration with Umeme, and with the support of the Modern Energy Cooking Services programme.

Download the report and learn about the findings here.

GGF - results-based inventory financing taking off

Despite a decade of innovation and data-driven progress, the off-grid solar sector still falls short in financing creditworthy companies that are vital to achieving SDG7. As 2030 draws near, the coming years will be crucial: We urgently need inclusive financing to empower distributors to serve customers and help realize universal energy access.

That’s where GGF comes in: through a streamlined due diligence process and ongoing monitoring via Prospect, we provide inventory financing to companies that consistently demonstrate strong performance.

Yes, PAYGO solar is not an easy business. Yet we continue to prove that sustainable growth is possible – when we build on lessons learned and stay committed to operational excellence.

Interested to learn more? Check out our video:

Prospect launched as dMRV platform for Tanzania rural electrification program

We are excited to announce the launch of Prospect as the dMRV platform for the Tanzania Rural Electrification Expansion Program’s (TREEP) RBF component!

Supported by the The World Bank, TREEP has helped Tanzania achieve one of the fastest energy access expansion rates in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, challenges remain with low rural electrification levels. To address this, TREEP is not only expanding grid connections but is also implementing offgrid solar and clean cooking appliance results-based financing (RBF) programs – which will be digitally supported by Prospect.

Over the past months, the Prospect team has customized the platform to meet TREEP’s specific needs and facilitated onboarding of all key stakeholders. The automated collection, aggregation, and analysis of recorded data will empower Tanzanian government officials to effectively monitor all installations and assess progress toward the National Renewable Energy Strategy. Energy service companies will be able to digitize their sales seamlessly, with installations verified independently, automatically, and digitally – ensuring rapid RBF disbursements.

We are proud to support the Tanzanian Ministry of Energy and Minerals and Tanzania’s Rural Energy Agency in promoting clean cooking solutions, reducing health risks and deforestation, and expanding clean energy access for rural households!

Prospect adopted by Burundi`s FESEC

This week, we conducted a successful training session to prepare for the launch of Prospect’s results-based financing (RBF) instance for the FESEC Project in Burundi. 

The Fonds d’Energie Solaire et de la Cuisson (FESEC) program, financed by the World Bank, aims to increase affordable clean energy access in rural Burundi, where electrification rates remain very low.

The training for the FESEC team and participating offgrid solar companies was led by Prospect and Eleorun Energy Solutions. Prospect will facilitate the digital monitoring, reporting, and verification, streamline RBF claims management, and empower stakeholders to make data-driven, transparent decisions.

This initiative is a cooperation between Eleorun Energy Solutions, Prospect, and Bamboo Capital. We are proud to collaborate to promote accountability and transparency while assisting to expand clean energy across Burundi! 

€6m ZE-Gen grant for GGF to power up disruptive climate finance

We are excited about GGF’s transformative collaboration with ZE-Gen!

A new €6 million grant by ZE-Gen, a collaborative initiative by The Carbon Trust and Innovate UK, supported by the IKEA Foundation, is enabling GGF to expand their impact and break down financial barriers for local solar distributors. This will create green jobs, empower businesses, and provide reliable and affordable solar generators to underserved communities.

Read more here in the press release.

Launch of Prospects public dashboard

We’re excited to announce the soft launch of ProspectStats!

Prospect has become a leading dMRV platform for energy access and energy transition data. We are proud to offer it as an open source and open access tool free of licensing fees – enabling sector-wide, data-driven and transparent decision making to accelerate clean energy access.

To further promote transparency and sector engagement, we are introducing ProspectStats – a public dashboard that highlights the platform’s key metrics. It features insights, both current and over time, such as:

✅ Geographical distribution of users and data
✅ Organization types (e.g., energy service companies, RBF programs, utilities, financiers, etc)
✅ Technologies involved (e.g., solar, productive use, clean cooking, mini-grids)
✅ Monitored device types (e.g., solar systems, meters, mini-grids)
✅ Data uploads, sources, and integration types
✅ System uptime and performance

We plan to expand ProspectStats over time to incorporate additional use cases such as financing, compliance tracking, and advanced analytics. Stay tuned for exciting updates and new insights!

Check out ProspectStats here: http://publicstats.prospect.energy/

A2EI at London Climate Action Week

We had the pleasure of engaging in insightful discussions with a diverse group of stakeholders from finance, business, politics, academia, and the non-profit sector to collaborate on how to replace millions of polluting, expensive fossil fuel generators with clean, solar-powered solutions at the London Climate Action Week.

During his keynote at the ZE-Gen – Zero Emission Generators flagship event, Thomas Duveau, CSO of A2EI, emphasized the critical role of digital monitoring, reporting, and verification to #StopGuessing in programs aiming to replace fuel generators with solar solutions.

The ZE-Gen event brought together global change makers to explore market opportunities for renewable energy and to accelerate the transition from fossil fuel generators to sustainable, renewable alternatives in low- to lower-middle-income countries.

We’re excited to partner with investors, innovators, and policymakers to develop software, hardware, and financing solutions for a fossil fuel-free future in Africa. Having established the market viability of reliable solar generator hardware, we are now focusing on providing accessible financing and delivering verified, transparent, and reliable data through our dMRV platform, Prospect.

Prospect at Innovate4Climate

At The World Bank’s Innovate4Climate conference, we had the honour of presenting Prospect to key stakeholders in the carbon market and climate finance sectors.

Stefan Zelazny, Prospect’s Project Lead, and Matthieu Rigal, Senior Software Developer, highlighted Prospect’s potential to transform carbon emission tracking and carbon credit trading through the provision of transparent data and reliable dMRV.

They also demonstrated how innovative tools such as the Access to Energy Institute’s “SLEEK Meter” – a low-cost, precise energy meter designed for challenging, low-connectivity environments – can be seamlessly integrated with Prospect. This enables electrification initiatives in remote areas without internet access to digitally monitor systems, verify impact, and participate transparently in carbon markets.

Currently, many climate change mitigation projects in the global South cannot actively participate in global carbon markets due to massive financial and administrative barriers. Digital tracking of emission savings can increase the level of trust in emission reductions credited as well as significantly reduce entry barriers and costs.

We are encouraged by the strong interest from stakeholders across public and private sectors, spanning finance, markets, policy, and technology, in how Prospect can facilitate the scaling of high-integrity carbon markets. We are committed to support efforts to make carbon markets more transparent, inclusive, and impactful – while working to unlock new financing pathways that advance a just energy transition.

Celebrating GGF’s first anniversary

This week marks a great milestone: GGF’s first anniversary!

Over the past year, A2EI spin-off GGF has made great strides in supporting solar energy distributors to advance the offgrid sector in sub-Saharan Africa. As a not-for-profit, GGF focuses on reducing financial barriers for high-performing solar distributors by providing vital inventory financing. Their innovative financing model combines data-driven, sector-specific due diligence with flexible payment terms. This empowers local businesses to acquire stock to boost their sales and grow sustainably, while mitigating carbon emissions.

In just one year, GGF has facilitated ten investments across six countries, supporting companies like Chromevoltech in Nigeria, NalaPayGo in Lesotho, SunGate Solar Ltd in SouthSudan, Oolu Solar in Burkina Faso, and Vitalite in Malawi. By establishing a strong foundation for results-based inventory financing, GGF has have ensured continuous supply for high-performing distributors and demonstrated the success and scalability of the GGF model.

Looking ahead, GGF is excited to further scale its impact, and the A2EI team is happy to support their quest! Thanks to major commitments from ZE-Gen and the IKEA Foundation, GGF has a solid base to expand their reach. It is now raising funds for the next phase of GGF to support a growing number of distributors across Africa to strengthen the entire solar sector – while benefiting local communities.

Cheers to many more years of scaling results-based inventory financing – thus advancing access to clean, affordable energy for all!

Assisting healthcare electrification in Nigeria with dMRV

We are pleased about Prospect’s continuing role as a dMRV tool for healthcare electrification in Nigeria. As part of its mandate to monitor all Delegation of the European Union to Nigeria and ECOWAS funded energy installations in Nigeria, Prospect will also serve as the digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (dMRV) platform for solar installations under the Nigeria Solar for Health Project (NISHP). The initiative aims to provide primary healthcare centres with sustainable 24/7 energy access. Last week, at the Project Developers Roundtable Workshop in Abuja, the EU announced a €10.4m investment in NISHP.

During the event Oladipupo Oshodi, Nigeria coordinator at Prospect, showcased how the platform empowers project stakeholders through:

☑️ automating data collection and verification;
☑️ reducing manual reporting burdens and compliance tasks;
☑️ seamlessly integrating with existing technologies;
☑️ delivering real-time insights for smarter decision-making and transparency;
☑️ supporting benchmarking and system optimization through long-term analytics.

These features are key as NISHP progresses, helping to ensure the continual sustainability of deployed systems, measure impact, and facilitate data-driven learning and evaluation. We are thrilled to collaborate with stakeholders across the health and energy sectors to integrate reliable solar energy with comprehensive dMRV to improve healthcare outcomes!

Prospect training in Malawi for the Ngwee Ngwee Ngwee Fund

We had a successful Prospect training session for stakeholders involved in the Malawi Electricity Access Project (MEAP). The Malawian Ministry of Energy, in collaboration with Eleorun Energy Solutions and A2EI, conducted a two-day Prospect training session for stakeholders involved in MEAP. The training brought together representatives from off-grid solar companies participating in the Ngwee Ngwee Ngwee Fund (NNNF), the Fund Manager, and Ministry officials. The sessions focused on practical onboarding to Prospect for remote monitoring and data reporting.

Eleorun Energy Solutions, in partnership with A2EI, has been customizing Prospect to fit the specific needs of the Fund – is a critical digital innovation designed to enhance transparency, efficiency, and accountability in the management of sales and claims under the NNNF. The Ministry of Energy engaged Eleorun Energy Solutions to develop and operationalise the platform to monitor installations, sales performance, payment records, and device tracking in near real-time.

RBF Workshop

Last week, the A2EI convened a group of RBF practitioners covering government officials, donors, companies, and academia to discuss best practices in RBF programs for a 2 day workshop in Kampala, Uganda.

The value of understanding the constraints of other stakeholders and the ability to exchange practical experiences across countries and programmes were emphasized by many participants. We believe that through collaborative efforts, we can effectively address ongoing challenges and enhance RBF approaches to maximize their impact and efficiency.

The topics ranging from dMRV tools to blueprinting techniques will continue to be explored – and first results and recommendations will be shared with the industry, possibly already at the AGM of GOGLA in June 2025 in Nairobi.

Prospect to monitor EU Delegation to Nigeria electrification efforts

We were delighted to see Prospect presented at the official launch of GET.invest Nigeria. The event gathered over 150 public and private sector stakeholders, marking a significant step for clean energy projects in Nigeria. Funded by the European Union and Germany, GET.invest Nigeria aims to close the financing gap for renewable energy businesses.

The Delegation of the European Union to Nigeria will utilize Prospect to monitor all electrification efforts they support as part of the EU Global Gateway. Razvan Sandru, Senior Advisor at Prospect, shared the platform’s digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (dMRV) capabilities with sector stakeholders, development partners, and investors. Utilising Prospect will enhance project visibility, instantly demonstrate the impact of financing, and streamline reporting through automatic real-time data collection.

We are excited about this partnership to deliver and analyse reliable data, supporting efforts to advance Nigeria’s energy transition!

Leveraging Prospect to Energize Healthcare

Engaging discussions at the Energizing Healthcare conference in Nairobi! The event underscored the essential role of reliable and clean energy in achieving SDG3 – good health and well-being for all. A significant emphasis was placed on monitoring progress and leveraging data to enhance healthcare electrification.

Reliable and verified data empowers service providers, funders, and governments to #StopGuessing. Prospect can bridge this gap by enabling stakeholders to verify installations, improve maintenance, analyze energy consumption trends, catalyse financing, facilitate data sharing, and optimize reporting for project success.

Thomas Duveau, CSO at Access to Energy Institute, introduced Prospect at the Monitoring Impact Workshop and the Innovators’ Hub, which was met with lively interest and further questions. At the Humanitarian Energy and Emergencies Roundtable, we focused on how data will be key to substitute the high number of fuel generators in refugee settlements.

We are excited to see a growing collaboration among the energy, health, and climate sectors to tackle challenges of healthcare electrification, and are looking forward to further partnerships!

Join the Prospect research webinar!

Are you a ZE-Gen Accelerator stakeholder interested in learning more about Prospect’s features, while exploring research on generators in Nigeria?

Join Zero Emission Generator’s upcoming research webinar! In this session, the A2EI team will walk participants through the use of Prospect, and present key data and insights obtained from 500 smart meters installed in Nigeria to monitor fossil fuel generator usage. The webinar will demonstrate how aggregating and visualising data in a series of dashboards enables comparative analysis of energy usage and operational performance across various customer clusters – ultimately aiming at replacing gensets with clean solar energy. The 30-minute presentation will be followed by a 15-30 minute Q&A session.

This is a session specifically for the ZE Gen cohort as it’s still in development – with a public session in April once the platform has been further developed.

🗓️ Wednesday, February 5   |  13:00 GMT  | 14:00 Nigeria
🔗 Register here!

A2EI at the Africa Energy Summit

We enjoyed inspiring discussions with African government officials, development partners, and private sector stakeholders at the Africa Energy Summit in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – focusing on Mission300 to provide electricity to 300 million people in Africa by 2030.

A key takeaway from the summit has already been the critical importance of data-driven, transparent, and digital impact assessments for tracking the progress of Misson300. The strong interest surrounding the digital monitoring, reporting and verification tools of our data platform Prospect (developed in collaboration with GET.invest) underscores its potential to reduce transaction costs while facilitating reporting and optimizing subsidy programs.

We especially enjoyed the meeting of Malama Chileshe, COMESA Secretariat programme coordinator for the ASCENT regional energy access acceleration platform and Thomas Duveau, Chief Strategy Officer of the A2EI. The best practices developed by COMESA for the digital monitoring of The World Bank’s ASCENT programme, which is leveraging the Prospect platform, offer an ideal blueprint for the digital impact assessment and tracking of Misson300.

We look forward to further collaborating with policymakers and sector stakeholders to promote data-driven decisions for sustainable electricity access across Africa!

Year in Review 2024

As we have approached the end of 2024, it’s time for us to reflect on the past year amidst the dynamic changes in our industry. We invite you to take a look at our brief Year in Review below.

A heartfelt thank you to our great team and colleagues in the off-grid solar sector, and to all our friends and supporters for your unwavering dedication and collaboration throughout the year. 2025 will bring new challenges, and we are eager to continue driving innovation for positive change. Together, let’s strengthen our partnerships and drive the energy transition as we work towards achieving SDG7.

At A2EI, we wish you all a joyous holiday season, a wonderful start to 2025, and the very best for the New Year!

Download our our Year in Review here

Empowering Primary Health Centers in Nigeria

Across Nigeria, approximately 40% of primary health centres (PHCs) have no access to electricity. Health centers with grid access only have an average power supply of 2-8 hours, leaving them with no power for most of the 24 hours of operation or reliant on dirty, expensive, and maintenance-intensive fuel generators.

To improve the energy access situation of primary health care, the Germany-based research and development non-profit organization Access to Energy Institute (A2EI), Nigerian solar distributor Chromevolt, and the Health Electrification and Telecommunications Alliance (HETA) – a USAID Global Development Alliance and Power Africa’s flagship initiative for health facility electrification and digital connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa – have joined hands to empower 75 Nigerian PHCs.

Ensuring reliable, sustainable energy access through solar generators

Since May 2024, the partnership has successfully electrified 54 Nigerian PHCs with solar generators, and the number is growing. The health centers were selected after in-depth consultations with the National Primary Health Care Development Agency of Nigeria and local authorities.

A customized version of A2EI’s solar generator – a large, standalone solar system including three 400Wp highly efficient PV modules, one 2 KVA hybrid inverter, and two 100Ah lead-carbon batteries optimized for lifetime and recyclability – was installed at each of the facilities.

To ensure the long-term sustainability of the solar generators, Chromevolt’s certified installation technicians carry out on-the-spot training of PHC personnel on their use. Furthermore, they provide complimentary 5-year maintenance of all components.

All systems are being monitored remotely through Prospect, an open-source data platform that conducts the automatic collection, aggregation, and analysis of energy, consumption, and maintenance data in near real time. The A2EI is putting its data scientists at the project’s disposal to ensure impact measurement, precise reporting, and data-based future recommendations for the healthcare sector.

Tackling the serious challenges of PHCs

The solar generators installed to date are in the North Central Regions of the Federal Capital Territory, Kaduna State, Nasarawa State, and Niger State. Each of the selected facilities serves up to 16,000 people and caters to the immediate healthcare needs of at least 2,000 women and children within the communities they cover. Services typically carried out include prenatal/postnatal care, pregnancy delivery and newborn care, antenatal education, immunization and vaccination, STI treatment, nutrition assessment, malaria treatment, lab tests, patient admission, basic surgery, first-aid, and other curative care.

Due to the unreliable grid, or absence of any energy supply, some of the facilities had depended on candles, kerosene lanterns, and rechargeable torch lights to deliver newborns, care for mothers after delivery, and administer first-aid to outpatients. Phones were mostly switched off and medical personnel were unreachable during emergencies. Some vaccines had to be placed in neighboring facilities’ cooling freezer or placed on ice coolers to avoid damage.

With reliable 24/7 power supply, the facilities are now able to run a range of medical appliances – including vaccination and medication fridges, electric microscopes, procedure lights, centrifuges, fetal heart monitors, oxygen concentrators, portable ultrasounds, and suction apparatuses. Furthermore, they can run ceiling fans, interior and exterior lighting, USB modems, laptops, printers, and mobile phones.

Creating solid positive impact for people and planet

The initiative creates real impact for the people who need it most: Mothers can now deliver their newborns in well-lit and fan-cooled facilities. Ultrasounds can be used for prenatal care and newborns can be properly taken care of. Vaccination campaigns can be run more efficiently, and the detection of diseases is sped up using electric lab equipment. Medical research and diagnostic cooperation opportunities are profoundly improved by Internet connectivity and the ability to charge laptops – and the use of electronic health, logistics, and financial information systems are made possible.

PHCs that previously depended on fuel generators report having more time and resources available for patients as there is no need to worry about the immense costs and hassle of fuel procurement and maintenance of fuel generators. The facilities are less noisy and not polluted by generator fumes.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 70,000 health centres still have an unreliable electrical supply, with ca. 25,000 healthcare facilities lacking any energy access. In the future, we need to provide innovative solutions to tackle this challenge, including robust, reliable solar generators optimized for the conditions on the ground, smart connectivity solutions, adequate funding, and comprehensive monitoring and analysis of systems to allow for data-based decisions. This way, we can mitigate climate change and contribute to the global energy transition – while saving lives on the ground.

About the partnership

The A2EI has a solid track-record in engineering and procuring so-called solar generators. In the healthcare sector, the institute draws e.g. from prior in-house research monitoring and analyzing the energy needs of health care facilities in Benin and Sierra Leone.

Nigerian solar distributor Chromevolt is responsible for the on-the-ground implementation, installation, and maintenance of the solar systems.

The initiative is funded by a grant from the Health Electrification and Telecommunications Alliance (HETA) in partnership with USAID and Power Africa.

Prospect is live as the dMRV platform for UECCC´s RBF program

We are excited to announce that, as of November 1st, Prospect has gone live as the digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (dMRV) platform for the Uganda Energy Credit Capitalisation Company’s (UECCC) Electricity Access Scale Up Project (EASP)!

The EASP’s results-based financing (RBF) scheme is primarily funded by the World Bank and includes participation of ca. 90 energy service companies seeking to distribute solar home systems and commercial systems, solar lanterns, technologies for schools and hospitals, cook stoves, and systems for productive use of energy. Its objective is to increase energy access for Ugandan households, businesses, industrial parks, and public institutions.            

The Prospect team customised the platform to meet UECCC’s and its stakeholders’ needs and has successfully onboarded all users of the instance. The automatic collection, aggregation, and analysis of the recorded data will enable Ugandan government officials to effectively monitor all funded projects and progress made on their electrification strategy. Energy service companies on the other hand will digitalise their sales efficiently, whilst RBF claims will be managed using customized dashboards, and will be verified automatically and digitally. This is expected to facilitate the swift disbursement of RBF tranches.

We are grateful to the dedicated teams at A2EI, GET.invest, and UECCC for their tireless contributions in driving the implementation. We look forward to our continued collaboration to support Uganda’s electrification strategy – promoting socio-economic development, while fostering sustainable energy access!

A2EI at GOGSFE24 in Nairobi

The A2EI team recently returned from the Global Off Grid Solar Forum and Expo 2024 in Nairobi, inspired by the opportunity to present our work and connect with colleagues and supporters.

We showcased our open-source data platform, Prospect (in collaboration with GET.invest), our new low-cost asynchronous electricity meter, our engineering expertise, and the GGF financing facility – proudly serving as the conference’s Knowledge Sponsor.

At the Prospect booth, we engaged with various stakeholders, including solar service companies, investors, and government officials. Notably, representatives from the Malawian Ministry of Energy were briefed on implementing Prospect for the Malawi Ngwee Ngwee Ngwee Fund as a digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV) platform.

We also participated in a stimulating panel discussion on transforming Impact Finance through dMRV, emphasizing the need for reliable, real-time data to secure financing and develop electrification strategies. Our goal is to provide the energy access sector with Prospect as a powerful tool for this purpose.

At the GGF booth, we introduced our novel financing instrument, enabling solar distributors to access inventory financing efficiently. An engaging public session covered the GGF approach, followed by a discussion featuring beneficiaries.

Finally, during our session on solar generators, we shared over a decade’s worth of experience in engineering, financing, and distributing solar solutions. Our engineering team underscored the importance of collaboration to optimize processes, enhance hardware, and scale the industry to achieve SDG7.

Following the sector-wide meetings and discussions, here are our key takeaways and next steps:

1) Data-Driven Impact Transparency
We’ve confirmed that transparent, digital, data-based impact assessment is crucial for advancing energy access. It allows us to:

• Measure real progress
• Identify effective electrification strategies
• Reduce transaction costs while improving precision of reporting
• Build trust with stakeholders
• Guide policy decisions
• Optimize existing subsidy programs through data-driven feedback loops

The power of data enables us to fine-tune subsidy programs for maximum impact, ensuring resources reach those who need them most.

2)  Innovative Solutions for Universal Access
Hundreds of millions still lack basic energy access. While private sector innovation is crucial, it’s clear that market forces alone won’t achieve universal access. We nee

• Creative approaches to reach underserved populations (e.g. the Rural Energy Access Lab)
• A stable and targeted subsidy landscape across all markets
• Public-private partnerships to support the most vulnerable
• Sustainable funding mechanisms to ensure long-term accessibility
  The reality is stark: universal energy access cannot be achieved by the private sector alone – we must combine commercial solutions with smart subsidy programs to reach those most in need.

3) Reforming Carbon Markets
Current carbon markets and standards aren’t inclusive of the energy access sector. This needs to change to:

• Recognize our sector’s contribution to climate change mitigation
  Support adaptation efforts in vulnerable communities
• Unlock new funding streams for energy access initiatives
• Increase trust and transparency while reducing costs through digital verification

4) Tackling Financial Barriers
Access to affordable finance, especially for small-scale projects, remains a significant hurdle. We’re focusing on:

• Developing innovative financing models (e.g. GGF)
• Engaging with financial institutions to create tailored solutions
• Advocating for policies that facilitate small-ticket investments in energy access

The path to universal energy access is complex, but with collaboration, innovation, and persistence, we can light up every corner of the world. Join us in this crucial mission!

A2EI at Innovate for Climate in Berlin

We had enriching discussions on advancing climate action across finance, markets, policy, and technology at Innovate for Climate in Berlin.

Stefan Zelazny, Managing Director of the Access to Energy Institute and lead on the Prospect project, emphasized the importance of digital Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV) for precise impact assessments during the panel titled “Unlocking Carbon Market Potential: The Impact of Transparent and Efficient End-to-End Digital Systems.” He showcased how innovations like Prospect promote transparency, efficiency, and growth within the carbon market. The panel highlighted essential components of a comprehensive digital ecosystem for carbon markets, including carbon asset registries, digital MRV solutions, trading platforms, and metadata layers like CAD Trust. Stefan also shared insights on innovative approaches for climate change mitigation during a dynamic workshop for young innovators.

Additionally, the A2EI/Prospect team participated at the World Bank’s Accelerating Sustainable and Clean Energy Access Transformation (ASCENT) booth, where we explained the setup and benefits of the open-source data platform, Prospect, to interested stakeholders. Thomas Duveau, CSO of the Access to Energy Institute, provided the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) team with a briefing on Prospect for the ASCENT program. Prospect, developed in collaboration with GET.invest, automates the collection, aggregation, analysis, and visualization of data from modern renewable energy solutions, significantly simplifying energy and climate tracking.

We also engaged in important discussions with diverse stakeholders about the global carbon market, digital MRV, emissions trading, and the path to net-zero emissions. We look forward to continuing these conversations and are excited to support stakeholders in adopting innovative approaches to digital monitoring and reporting, ultimately making carbon markets more transparent, efficient, and inclusive.

Call for Proposals: Electric Cooking Phone Survey in Kenya

A2EI seeking a local firm to conduct a phone survey with up to 3000 households in Kenya in late 2024 and early 2025 and an additional follow-up survey with the same households in August and September 2025. A2EI is soliciting proposals from qualified organizations to conduct the survey.

Organizations shall submit proposals to Elliot.Avila@A2EI.org by August 21, 2024 and any questions shall be submitted before August 14, 2024. The proposal shall consist of a cover letter, a written proposal, and a budget.

Find out more about the project, role and expected qualifications of the implementing organization, expected results, the draft baseline survey, as well as application procedures here:
Terms of Reference / Electric Cooking Phone Survey in Kenya.

HETA/Power Africa visit to solar powered health centers in Nigeria

We’re excited about the swift progress being made by our initiative to empower healthcare in Nigeria.

Together with Nigerian solar distributor Chromevolt, and funded by the Health Electrification and Telecommunications Alliance (HETA) in partnership with USAID and Power Africa, we are electrifying 75 primary health care centers with A2EI’s Solar Generator.

Last week, Power Africa coordinator Richard Nelson, and the Executive Director of the Rural Electrification Agency of Nigeria, Doris Uboh, had the chance to visit Apo Resettlement health facility, one of the solar empowered health centers.

Watch this space for further updates on our progress in promoting sustainable healthcare facility electrification throughout Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa!

Short paper on the Impact-Survey-Bot & Data Collection in Sub-Saharan Africa

In the past, web-based surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa have suffered from connectivity and device ownership issues, and consequently, most surveys in this area are still administered using paper-based methodology. In recent years, however, smartphones and instant messengers have become more prevalent, and therefore, chatbot-based surveys have become an option – one that has, up to now, seldom been used despite large potential benefits.

The Impact-Survey-Bot is a WhatsApp/Telegram chatbot for conducting surveys and data forms, developed by A2EI, and used by A2EI and various partners in research. Together with CODE University of Applied Sciences and RCHA RDC/Asbl, Lukas Müller from A2EI researched its feasibility for data collection in Sub-Saharan Africa in a small qualitative study.

The study concludes that data collection was feasible with different study designs, and could revolutionize data collection in Sub-Saharan Africa because remote (especially web-based) surveys are challenging. Specifically the familiar interface of WhatsApp, the digitisation of the research process, and the opportunity to include voice messages, pictures and GPS were significant success factors.

The short paper can be found in ACM’s digital library: https://doi.org/10.1145/3640794.3665584

Download the associated poster here.

Women in Tech / in-country Prospect consultant programme

Prospect is looking for IT customer service experts to join its “Women in Tech / in-country Prospect consultant” programme!

Prospect aims to build a pool of in-country customer support experts that can advise users of the data platform. This current call is to identify and train a pipeline of up to 10 trainees on the use of Prospect through an all-expenses-paid in-person initial training. Candidates will be supported with paid on-the-job training on onboarding and advising users of the platform.

As trained in-country Prospect consultants, trainees will be better equipped in setting up their own commercial services around the use of the free and open-source platform Prospect. This opportunity is a step towards bridging the gender gap in the tech industry and enhancing energy access across Africa. By participating in this initiative, trainees are not only investing in their individual growth – but also contributing to the broader development of the African tech industry.

Prospect is the only open-source based platform that automatically collects, harmonises, aggregates, analyses and displays data from any modern, sustainable energy solution that contributes to energy access. It is being developed by the Access to Energy Institute and GET.invest with support from the European Union, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Austria.

Learn more here.

Prospect - UECCC training workshop for Ugandan energy service companies

We are making clear progress toward the implementation of the open source data platform Prospect as part of Uganda Energy Credit Capitalisation Company’s (UECCC) Electricity Access Scale-up Project (EASP)!

Recently, the UECCC hosted a comprehensive 2-day training workshop, jointly conducted with the Prospect team, for energy service companies in Uganda. The workshop introduced Prospect to over 70 stakeholders from shortlisted companies that will potentially benefit from the World Bank-backed results-based financing program as part of EASP.

Prospect – a collaboration between A2EI and GET.invest – will be utilized for the automatic collection, aggregation, verification, display, and analysis of data under the RBF program. During the intense hands-on sessions stakeholders learned how to use Prospect to share data, identify eligible sales and submit claims for the upcoming EASP project. Very valuable feedback was given by the participants that will shape the final program interface of Prospect to allow a robust and efficient digital support for the EASP program with next-level digital verification.

We’re excited about the huge interest of local energy service companies in Prospect – and look forward to continuing support for all stakeholders to promote data-backed transparency and accountability while providing sustainable energy access throughout Uganda!

Jennifer Morgan visit at solar powered healthcare facility in Nigeria

We were pleased to host State Secretary and Special Envoy for International Climate Action Jennifer Morgan from the Auswärtiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office) Germany for the visit of a primary healthcare facility in Lagos, Nigeria, which has recently been equipped with a solar generator from the A2EI.

The solar generator is powering part of the equipment in the clinic, and more importantly is the power back-up for the facility when the grid is not working – which happens frequently. Dr. Segun Adaju, the founder of Consistent Energy Limited and former President of the Renewable Energy Association of Nigeria explained how solar energy can improve energy supply of public infrastructure such as healthcare facilities.

The visit was organised by the German Consulate in Lagos, represented by the Consul General, Mr. Börner and his deputy, Mr. Wolf. Thomas Duveau from the A2EI accompanied the State Secretary during her visit and presented both the solar generator concept as well as the Green Genset Facility recently launched. The benefits of monitoring and analysing the solar solutions via the open-source platform Prospect were also discussed.

Prospect and A2EI at Open Source in Energy Access Symposium in Abuja

We had the pleasure of fruitful discussions and exchange between developers, industry leaders, and diverse stakeholders at the first ever Open Source in Energy Access Symposium in Abuja, Nigeria.

We especially enjoyed presenting Prospect, the opensource data platform by A2EI and GET.invest – in case you missed it, please check out the recording.

A big thanks to the organizers The EnAccess Foundation and World Resources Institute for making this a successful event – and encouraging global collaboration throughout the open source community to advance access to sustainable energy in Africa and beyond!

Sierra Leone Healthcare Electrification Project

We’re excited to support the Sierra Leone Healthcare Electrification Project and Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL)’s efforts to bring clean energy access to hospitals!

Crown Agents, nLine, and the Access to Energy Institute have been collaborating in providing & installing smart meters on six major hospitals on SierraLeone – monitoring energy consumption by power source and evaluating the energy needs of the facilities over an extended period of time.

The live tracking of consumption data via the open-source data platform Prospect – a collaboration between A2EI and GET.invest – allows for the subsequent evaluation of individual load profiles and energy demand. The data analysis lets us gain a better understanding of how to both calibrate solar solutions for individual clinics and dimension solar systems specifically geared towards the entire healthcare sector.

Watch SEforALL’s video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5VOdWLPJS0

We will be sharing the results of our analysis here in the near future – watch this space for more!

A2EI solar generator workshop in Nigeria

A huge thank-you to everyone who made our 2-day deep dive into how to replace the millions of dirty fuel generators in Nigeria with clean solar solutions a success!

We just hosted an exciting field trip and workshop in Abuja, Nigeria – getting close up with the realities of both fuel and solar generators, meeting customers and visiting enterprises on the ground. We engaged with and listened to customers and business owners, their needs, concerns – and most of all: their requests for efficient, quiet, healthy and affordable alternatives to fossil fuel generators. We met with distributors and discussed the opportunities and challenges they face in scaling the provision of solar generators. And we met with local authorities, financial institutions, and donors who are crucial to unlocking the scale up of solar solutions.

To wrap it up, we engaged in focused discussions on how to digest the input from different stakeholders, and brainstormed ideas on how to solve the main difficulty distributors are facing – acquiring hard currency working capital to pre-finance solar systems.

Watch this space for more on the solutions we are coming up with!

Signing of Prospect implementation agreement with UECCC

Fruitful discussions and great news from Kampala! We’re excited to have signed an implementation agreement with the Uganda Energy Credit Capitalisation Company for the automation of the Results Based Financing Programme of the Electricity Access Scale-up project (EASP).

The implementation will see the EASP’s The World Bank-backed RBF program’s Monitoring and Evaluation component automated, monitored, and reported upon via our data platform Prospect – a collaboration between Access to Energy Institute and the European programme GET.invest, supported by the European Union, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Austria.

We look forward to assisting the advancement of Uganda’s ambitious electrification strategy, aiming to achieve sustainable energy access throughout the country, while fostering socioeconomic development and combating climate change.

A2EI at Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue

We’re glad to have been part of the Berlin Energy Transition dialogue 2024, entering its 10^th edition this year!

We enjoyed the chance to meet with government representatives, business leaders, scientists, international organisations and NGOs from across the world at the inspiring 2-day event at the Auswärtiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office) Germany.

We were excited to see our CSO Thomas Duveau present our in-house engineered solar generator – stressing that by now, all small fuel generators can be replaced by solar alternatives, saving millions of tons of carbon. Additionally, we were honoured to discuss how we can contribute to the energy transition by providing open-source data and analysis on sustainable electrification.

An energy transition that achieves 100% renewable energy is possible – this simple message was the starting point, as well as main message of the dialogue. However, to combat the global climate crisis, nothing less but the constant collaboration of all local and international stakeholders is essential.

Official Launch of Green Genset Facility

The Green Genset Facility (GGF) has officially been launched at the Transforming Energy Access Forum 2024 in Kigali!

This represents an exciting step for global efforts to replace fossil fuel-powered generators with renewable energy-based alternatives.

The GGF, a spin-off from the Access to Energy Institute, will make it simple and transparent for distributors to buy solar-powered generators, accelerating a move away from fossil fuel alternatives. The facility will address the lack of accessible and affordable working capital — seen as the biggest obstacle that distributors face in procuring solar generators from suppliers.

Through digital tracking of repayment and usage patterns, the facility will make it easier to buy stock to serve customers and grow distributors’ businesses, with the aim to improve livelihoods, reduce emissions and pollution in Africa. In a market due to exceed $20 billion in Nigeria alone, the facility will focus on unlocking the market for solar powered generators with the aim of raising $100 million in funding.

GGF will be open for applications from distributors starting April 2024 – watch this space for more: https://www.ggf.energy/

Download the full press release by our collaboration partner ZE-Gen here: Transition to renewable electricity generation given jumpstart with funding announced at Transforming Energy Access Forum.

Summary 2023 | Wishing you a peaceful, happy, and healthy 2024!

With 2023 coming to an end, we would like to have a joint look back at the year and what it meant to the A2EI. Please check out our Year in Review for 2023 outlining the key achievements and developments of the A2EI’s different projects here: SUMMARY 2023

We at the A2EI would like to thank all of you – our great team members, colleagues, friends, and supporters – for your work, contributions, collaboration, and continuous dedication to support the energy transition and reaching #SDG7.

We wish you a peaceful and joyous start into 2024, and all the very best for the New Year!

Report on Electric Cooking by IRENA & A2EI Launched at COP

A new report on electric cooking written by authors at A2EI and the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) was announced this week at COP28 at a high-level panel featuring IRENA’s Deputy General Director Gauri Singh.

The report investigates the global landscape for electric cooking and assesses countries’ access levels and climate commitments. It finds that there are opportunities to increase commitments towards scaling-up electric cooking, especially given that cooking represents 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions and has positive co-benefits related to health, gender, and the environment. The report also discusses the global financial landscape for electric cooking and identifies barriers that limit or restrict financial flows that are necessary for scaling up electric cooking. Following this, the report outlines three strategies for scaling up finance for renewables-based electric cooking that leverage opportunities in the private sector, the electricity sector, and carbon finance. The report also creates country profiles and action plans for a number of IRENA members that have opportunities for scaling up electric cooking.

Download the full report here.

New report on using electric pressure cookers in Kigali, Rwanda

A2EI recently supported a study led by SEforAll and Nexleaf Analytics on the adoption of electric pressure cookers in Kigali, Rwanda. 100 households that purchased electric pressure cookers had their cooking behaviors tracked through a combination of surveys, stove use monitors, and appliance energy meters. The study found that households viewed their EPCs favorably and used them an average of 1.4 times per day throughout the study period, resulting in a 30% reduction in charcoal usage.

This study was done in partnership with SEforAll, Nexleaf Analytics, MECS, Electrocook, and Climate Solutions Consulting with support from the Swedish Postcode Foundation.

Please download the report here.

A2EI celebrates its 5th anniversary!

Five years ago, we founded the A2EI to help solve two global problems: on the one hand, bringing sustainable and affordable electricity to all, and on the other hand, to fight global warming. We have achieved a lot so far – and we are working hard to continue to make comprehensive data, as well as reliable solar generators and DC appliances available to a greater number of stakeholders worldwide.

It has been a great pleasure and privilege to shape the A2EI over the past five years, together with many of you – team members, friends, and supporters. We are confident that by working collaboratively, we will be able to accelerate the pace towards reaching SDG7 in the years to come!

Learn more about what we at the A2EI have achieved so far:

Chromevolt CSR project to power Dutse Healthcare Center

Excellent initiative by our Nigerian partner Chromevolt: They electrified Dutse Makaranta Primary Healthcare Center in the suburbs of Abuja, Nigeria. The facility had been lacking power supply from the grid for over a year now. 

As part of their corporate social responsibility program, Chromevolt installed an AAM3000 A2EI Solar Generator with 3x 420W Panels. The solar system is providing electricity to fridges for medications and vaccinations, as well as fans, lights, and lab equipment. It is powering the pharmacy, the labour and delivery room, the antenatal hall, the laboratory, and two hospital rooms for patients.

We are proud to be partnering with a local distributor that does not only tackle the challenges of providing green and reliable electricity to customers – but goes the extra mile to donate solar systems, and time and efforts, to institutions and people in need!

Working with both local and international partners, we aim to join hands to empower many more health facilities in the months and years to come – striving to #LeaveNoOneBehind.

A2EI workshop series on collective approaches to achieving SDG7

On September 21th/22nd, A2EI will be hosting a series of workshops to brainstorm collective approaches to tackling some of the most pressing challenges on the road to achieving SDG7: 1) strategies to #LeaveNoOneBehind, 2) how to procure working capital for (sm)all distributors, and 3) improving digitization.

1) Even through there has been progress towards SDG7, it is estimated that over 519 million people, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, will still lack energy access by 2030. We will brainstorm strategies on how to actually get clean energy solutions to everyone.

2) To bridge the affordability gap, we will aim to find solutions to one of the main constraints for growth – making working capital available for local distributors. We will develop strategies on to build a widely accessible facility, and how to define financiers, beneficiaries, and management.

3) Last but not least we will be looking at the potential of digital solutions to support achieving SDG7 – e.g. by reporting accurately and transparently, while having the ability to automatically monetize impact.

Together, we aim to create a “Think and Do Tank” to accelerate innovations to get as close as possible to SDG7 by 2030. We have invited key experts representing a wide variety of fields within the off-grid solar sector. Nevertheless, with limited space available, we rely on your virtual input as well. We would love to hear your ideas, input, concerns on these topics! Please tag us @A2EI_ with the hashtag #A2EIWorkshop or email us at info@a2ei.org.

We will keep you up-to-date on the outcomes of our first workshop series – and look forward to collectively working on solutions to achieve SDG7!

Live webinar on Cicada

The A2EI, together with The EnAccess Foundation and Okra Solar, invite you to join the live webinar to learn about Cicada: the Open Source IoT Comms Module – an Open Source communications module specifically created for rural energy access organizations that operate in remote communities.

Cicada is the IoT communications module with GSM & WiFi capabilities that allows Energy Access appliances like mini-grids and SHS to send and receive information about energy use. It enables energy service providers to expand their services to rural communities that traditionally have been hard to reach.

Before Cicada was developed by Okra Solar, existing off-the-shelf solutions were not rugged enough to perform in low-connectivity environments. This prompted Okra Solar to develop an Open Source solution, so that other companies on the same mission could use and customize the technology to their own needs.

Recently, A2EI discovered that the Cidada GSM module could work for one of their upcoming projects – but it requires a bit of customization for their particular use case.

In this webinar, Reinier van Kampenhout (Senior Firmware Developer) will explain why A2EI opted for Cicada and not a proprietary IoT comms solution, while Georg Lippitsch (Firmware Engineer) from Okra Solar will cover the details of Cicada’s development and provide a live demo on how to get started with integration.

Vivien Barnier, CEO of EnAccess, will be moderating the event.

Who Should Join?

People with a technical background in Software and Hardware Development will find this webinar especially interesting because we will be doing a deeper dive into Cicada’s specifications & features. However, anyone that wants to stay current regarding the latest technology available in our Energy Access sector is encouraged to join.

Register now: https://my.demio.com/ref/CPqYx2uW2X25vHOC?utm_source=social&utm_medium=enaccess&utm_campaign=cicada_webinar – if you can’t make it for the live event, we’ll send a video replay out shortly after the webinar is over.

Solar Generator Working Capital Facility

Three years ago, at the Access to Energy Institute, we embarked on a mission to help Nigerians get rid of millions of small fossil fuel generators – that are noisy, expensive, hazardous to people’s health, and emit large amounts of carbon.

We have developed a solar alternative, and the first 1,000 solar generators have been installed by our local distribution partners in Nigeria in 2022. We’re now at over 1,600 systems dispersed to distributors – and counting… Our customers are experiencing a greatly improved quality of life and are freed from noise, fumes and the hassle of procuring fuel.

However, the problem that needs to be overcome before the solar generator becomes a solution for everyone is the availability of working capital for distributors.

Learn more about the next steps necessary to replace fossil fuel generators with this clean, reliable, and affordable alternative:

A2EI Data Supports Clean Electric Cooking

Is it possible to replace charcoal and biomass cooking by clean e-cooking – thus avoiding deforestation, household air pollution, and massive carbon emissions?

We began our research on clean electric cooking a few years ago in over ten different countries. Working with partners around the world, we have gathered data directly from households, conducted ample research and published several reports on how electric cooking appliances are used. We generally observed high adoption rates of electric pressure cookers (EPCs), steady usage rates at lower electricity rates, and substantial time savings of e-cooking.

We are now focussing on analysing the aggregate demand of EPCs in grid environments. What if EPCs became the main cooking device in a country? Could this mean the end of charcoal, and what grid measures would be needed to cater for the new load? With the support of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, the A2EI is building a so-called “Appliance Demand Platform” to investigate.

Learn more about how A2EI data supports clean electric cooking:

Project Update: Solar4Clinics Benin

Within our Solar4Clinics project, executed by A2EI and GIZ in collaboration with the Benin Ministry of Health, we monitored the energy consumption of health facilities in Benin.

We analyzed the data to determine standard load profiles, energy demand – and to find out if A2EI’s solar generators are a suitable hardware for smaller clinics.

Learn more: Project Update – Solar4Clinics Benin

Call For Bids: Electric Cooking Research Project in Uganda

A2EI is seeking a local partner to implement a research project on electric cooking conducted over 18 months with 500 households in the greater Kampala metropolitan area. A2EI is soliciting proposals from qualified organizations to implement the project.

The project is a research project to study the utilization of electric cooking appliances in households and shall take place over 12 months and be conducted with 500 households in the greater Kampala metropolitan area. Households that participate in the project will receive electric cooking appliances and smart meters that are used to capture real-time data on the appliance usage. Throughout the study, the participants will be surveyed and will receive reimbursements for their electricity consumption based on their overall appliance utilization.

Please download the full Call For Bids here: Call For Bids: Electric Cooking Research Project in Uganda

Summary 2022 | Wishing you a happy, healthy, and successful New Year!

We at the A2EI wish you – our fellow colleagues, friends, and supporters – Happy Holidays, and all the very best for 2023!

If you would like to learn more about our major hardware, software and data achievements in 2022, please have a look at our “summary 2022” here: 2022. A SUMMARY.

Please contact us if you have ideas or requests of your own.

Looking forward to 2023, together with you, and our wonderful team!

COP27: A2EI Pledges to Electrify 100 Health Clinics with its Solar Generator

The Access to Energy Institute (A2EI) has announced its pledge to electrify 100 health clinics on the African continent during COP27 in Egypt in support of the HETA initiative. Installing their “Solar Generators” will provide health facilities with powerful low-maintenance energy solutions to ensure modern efficient healthcare while reducing their CO₂ footprint.

The A2EI’s Solar Generator, which has already been installed more than 1,000 times in Nigeria, is combining a large solar array, powerful batteries and advanced electronics for health clinics, mostly in rural areas. The electrification of public infrastructure, in particular of healthcare institutions is the perfect fit for the open source hardware solutions of the A2EI to help accelerate clean energy provision at scale. Every installed Solar Generator will be remotely monitored in real time through the A2EI’s data platform, which allows for effective maintenance and precise and digital impact assessment. The installation of the 100 Solar Generators will replace the usage of diesel generators and support effective climate change mitigation by reducing CO₂ emissions.

According to the World Bank, more than 70% of the health infrastructure on the African continent does not have access to reliable energy. Not only can vaccines not be stored adequately. The region also has the highest under-five mortality rate in the world, with one in 13 children dying before their fifth birthday. Many of these deaths could be prevented with adequate health infrastructure, such as lighting and medical equipment, that facilitates improved obstetrics and child healthcare.

The A2EI was founded in 2018 with core support from IKEA Foundation, DOEN Foundation and Good Energies Foundation with the specific remit to develop larger solar solutions that can empower small businesses and government institutions. By providing the sector with efficient, reliable and affordable open-source solar hardware, the A2EI strives to contribute notably towards achieving SDG7 – while improving livelihoods and creating jobs and additional income for the world’s most vulnerable. By substituting fossil fuels through solar generators, the quality of life of customers increases, health hazards caused by fumes and noise are reduced, and the efficiency of public institutions can be boosted substantially. The compounded climate effect of replacing fossil energy also mitigates climate change and can generate carbon credits.

During the announcement at COP27, Thomas Gottschalk, CEO and founder of the A2EI declared: “Our remit at the A2EI is to develop innovative and powerful solar solutions such as our solar generator to give health clinics on the African continent the energy they need to provide modern healthcare, reduce child mortality and increase the quality of service to all of their customers, while reducing climate emissions.”

Jolanda van Ginkel, Programme Manager (Renewable Energy) at the IKEA Foundation, said: “The work of the IKEA Foundation is based on our deep conviction that improving livelihoods and protecting the planet are inseparable. The work of the A2EI is a good example of our partners providing innovative solutions that does exactly this: improving lives of doctors, nurses and midwives and the patients they serve while contributing to a healthier environment.“

Note to editors

About Access to Energy Institute

A2EI is the first not-for-profit and collaborative research and development institute aiming to advance renewable energy access in emerging economies. It provides broad, reliable open-source data, as well as on-the-ground research and analysis of solar solutions, and software platforms to administer these. Additionally, A2EI develops and procures solar system and appliance prototypes and initiates pilot projects – aiming to provide widely scalable sustainable energy research and solutions as a common good.

Learn more at: www.a2ei.org

About IKEA Foundation

The IKEA Foundation is a strategic philanthropy that focuses its grant making efforts on tackling the two biggest threats to children’s futures: poverty and climate change. It currently grants more than €200 million per year to help improve family incomes and quality of life while protecting the planet from climate change. Since 2009, the IKEA Foundation has granted more than €1.5 billion to create a better future for children and their families. In 2021 the Board of the IKEA Foundation decided to make an additional €1 billion available over the next five years to accelerate the reduction of Greenhouse Gas emissions.

Learn more at: www.ikeafoundation.org

Media contacts:

Access to Energy Institute:

Thomas Duveau, +49 1633232023, thomas.duveau@a2ei.org

IKEA Foundation:

Lotika Mehta, +31 621650748, lotika.mehta@ikeafoundation.org

A2EI, Odyssey & GBE collaborate to remotely monitor healthcare infrastructure electrification in Benin

The Access to Energy Institute (A2EI), Odyssey Energy Solutions and Green People’s Energy (GBE) have partnered to monitor the state of electricity access at health centres in Benin.

According to surveys carried out by the GBE project in Benin between 2020-2021, over 69% of solar systems installed at health centres in Benin in the past five years prior were no longer working. With much focus put on installing solar systems at health centres, very little attention is placed on what happens after commissioning. In most cases, due to lack of maintenance and proper care, solar systems fail, and the social infrastructure lacks the financial, institutional, or technical capacity to repair systems or to replace faulty parts. When maintenance contracts are signed with private operators, government agencies have a hard time knowing if the maintenance is really carried out and if the solar systems are actually working in remote villages.

In collaboration with the Beninese Agency for Health Infrastructure, Equipment and Maintenance (AISEM), A2EI and the GIZ project GBE Benin have commenced to gather the necessary data to monitor systems and thus ensure their longevity. They have so far installed 20 smart data loggers at 10 on-grid and 10 off-grid health infrastructures. The real-time smart meter data is gathered by the data platform Prospect (a collaboration between A2EI and GET.invest) and ingested and visualized by Odyssey, delivering data-driven insights to various government stakeholders, private operators and funders. As an extension of this work to date, discussions are ongoing for a second wave of data loggers at remote grid-connected and off-grid health centres, financed by GBE Benin.

Visualisations on the A2EI/GET.invest and Odyssey platforms allow for the automated, real-time tracking of each health infrastructure, as well as the analysis of the entire portfolio of solar systems installed at the health infrastructures.

Switching to more sustainable electrification models– like service-based electrification approaches through a private operator– requires a precise evaluation of ongoing performance. The most reliable and cost-effective solution is to collect and analyse real-time information through smart on-site data loggers. Data collected allows for an assessment of the quality of the electricity connection and the service provided by the private operator. At the same time, it improves estimating demand for the sizing of future electrification projects by providing fact-based sizing of systems. As a result, solar installations are better suited to cover the required demand of a health centre, while at the same time reducing the risk of oversizing the solar system, ultimately making more efficient use of public funds.

About GBE Benin

GBE Benin is a project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and aims to facilitate, expand and secure the supply of sustainable energy in rural Africa. It relies on the broad participation of small and medium-sized enterprises, municipalities, cooperatives, public associations and citizens.

About The Access to Energy Institute (A2EI)

The A2EI is the first not-for-profit and collaborative research and development institute aiming to advance renewable energy access in emerging economies. A2EI provides broad, reliable open-source data and on-the-ground research, develops solar system and appliance prototypes, and initiates pilot projects in target regions. A2EI’s contribution to this collaboration is partly funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) to combat the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic through the GET.invest programme.

About Odyssey Energy Solutions

Odyssey is an end-to-end technology and data platform for the distributed renewable energy sector to finance, build, and operate portfolios at scale. Through Odyssey’s remote monitoring and control tools, performance monitoring and financial data is collected and displayed on the platform’s interactive dashboards, giving stakeholders the visibility they need to fully understand their project portfolios.

GET.invest and A2EI Launch Global Open-Source Data Platform PROSPECT

The Access to Energy Institute (A2EI) and the European programme GET.invest officially launched the data platform Prospect at the Global Off-Grid Solar Forum and Expo 2022 in Kigali today. Prospect radically optimizes real-time data collection, analysis, and visualisation to support sustainable energy stakeholders in providing affordable and clean energy access for all. Prospect is supported by the European Union, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Austria.

Prospect is the first global open-source, product-agnostic, real-time and free-of-charge data and transaction platform that automatically collects, aggregates, analyses and displays data from all modern sustainable energy solutions. The platform facilitates big data analysis on any product segment, region, and country in near real-time. It tracks energy services ranging from small solar home systems to large mini-grids and grid-connected distribution networks – while also covering productive use appliances, modern clean cooking solutions, and systems installed in public institutions.

The platform employs a unique “energy fingerprint + heartbeat” methodology that combines customer, technical, usage, maintenance, and payment data streams to authenticate performance and impact, while adhering to strict data privacy policies. It transparently makes multi-layered data available both at the individual system and at project or aggregate level.

Prospect allows for instantaneous secure data sharing, empowering users to leverage their data to gain insights, raise finance, prove results, and contribute to broader research within the energy sector. It facilitates extensive automatic reporting, monitoring and evaluation and features a built-in transaction functionality to support financing and subsidy disbursements. Providing distributors, investors, funders and governments alike with a broad range of analytical and practical opportunities, Prospect aims to serve as a trust provider for all sustainable energy access stakeholders.

Prospect was borne out of the climate technology experiences of two aligned efforts: the Edison data platform, built by the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) to support the Beyond the Grid Fund for Zambia funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida); and the Climate Impact Payments Platform (CLIPP), developed by A2EI to prototype innovative impact monetization approaches.

“Sida has come to rely ever more on accurate, reliable and up-to-date data in our program planning and decision-making in the energy sector, and with Prospect we are investing in taking our existing efforts to the next level,” said Anders Arvidson of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, one of the donors behind Prospect. “We are thrilled to see this partnership between A2EI and GET.invest, which will also leverage GET.invest’s deep network and experience in advising and mobilizing investment for off-grid projects and companies.”

Stefan Zelazny, Prospect Project Lead and Managing Director at A2EI, explained: “Our mission is to provide a cutting-edge digital platform, advanced data analytics and technical support to anyone who enables, funds or delivers modern sustainable energy to underserved people, and do so reflecting a commitment to open-source and open access.”

“Together with A2EI and with the support from the European Union, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Austria, we are building next-generation data infrastructure for the off-grid sector that reflects the values of the Just Transition,” said John Tkacik, who coordinates Prospect at GET.invest.

Justin Mukosa, Manager Corporate Affairs at the Zambian Rural Electrification Authority (REA), one of the first official Prospect users: “REA Zambia is proud to be associated with A2EI and GET.invest in the development of an open data platform that would enable transparent access to high quality and verified data, contributing to the optimization of our ambitious electrification strategy. Further, high quality and verifiable data would enable REA to secure long-term financing. We believe that availability of data is key to swift scaling up and increased uptake of renewable off-grid energy projects in Africa.”

About A2EI

A2EI is the first not-for-profit and collaborative research and development institute aiming to advance renewable energy access in emerging economies. It provides broad, reliable open-source data, as well as on-the-ground research and analysis of solar solutions, and software platforms to administer these. Additionally, A2EI develops and procures solar system and appliance prototypes and initiates pilot projects – aiming to provide widely scalable sustainable energy research and solutions as a common good.

About GET.invest

GET.invest is a leading programme that supports investments in private sector clean energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific region. The programme works across all relevant clean energy technologies and business models, assisting project developers and companies towards bankability and linking them with financiers. Since 2022, GET.invest powers the Team Europe One Stop Shop for Green Energy Investments, an access point for information about and facilitated access to European support and financing instruments for energy projects and companies. GET.invest is supported by the European Union, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Austria.

Press contact:

Lisa Schwarz

Lisa.schwarz@a2ei.org

Christina Gewehr

Christina.gewehr@get-invest.eu

A2EI Unlocks Further Access to Energy Through the OpenPAYGO Token

We’re excited to announce our collaboration with Solaris Offgrid. A2EI has recently adopted the OpenPAYGO™ Token, Solaris Offgrid’s renowned open-source communication protocol, to make our AAM-Series devices Paygo and boost our mission of unlocking innovative solar products for unbanked communities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Millions of polluting fuel generators around the world are still for the most part the only back-up electricity infrastructure for the insufficient grid. As an alternative, solar generators are technically feasible, and could have a great impact in the market. However, no affordable suitable solar products are yet available at a larger scale.

Applying an open-source philosophy to hardware, A2EI aims to tackle this lack of products. We have developed solar generators with the potential to substitute most fuel generators, while remaining affordable to customers. The intellectual property of the solar generator is shared freely and the product comes to market “at cost”, as A2EI has taken on the R&D costs on behalf of the sector and does not take a commercial margin, which allows them to provide an affordable product.

“We’re proud to see how the OpenPAYGO Token is being widely adopted and recognised as a Paygo token standard, allowing innovative players in the industry, such as A2EI, to save resources while reaching households in remote areas with reliable Paygo-compatible products. A2EI’s mission aligns perfectly with that of Solaris Offgrid which makes it smoother for us to support them in reaching more households with robust offgrid solar products and accelerating access to clean energy in emerging markets”, Thibault Lesueur, Co-founder and CCO at Solaris Offgrid.

Small businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa using the AAM-Series can benefit from a reliable uninterrupted power supply, while keeping their workers safe from hazardous fumes, helping to mitigate climate change. Supported by Solaris Offgrid’s renowned open-source token system, the OpenPAYGO Token, the AAM-Series is Paygo-enabled, allowing last-mile distributors to reach remote communities and offer the much-needed devices on a Paygo basis. Moreover, A2EI is taking a step further and currently testing out the PaygOps SaaS platform, which is expected to bring further flexibility into their operations to streamline the access to their high-efficiency Paygo devices.

“Pay-As-You-go is a proven concept to reduce the initial burden for solar system customers to make it competitive with traditional generators and with the OpenPAYGO Token we have integrated the most open and wide-spread technology. Moreover, the combination of a flexible software as PaygOps supporting A2EI’s open-source hardware approach can be a game changer on our mission to replace millions of traditional fossil generators with clean and reliable solar generators”, Thomas Gottschalk, Co-CEO at A2EI.

The robust, efficient and affordable solar generators combine high-efficiency photovoltaic solar modules, long life battery storage, LCD user interface, and the functions of AC inverter, MPPT solar charger, switch over and AC battery charger, while supporting pay-as-you-go functionalities.

About Solaris Offgrid

Solaris Offgrid supports distributors and manufacturers across all industries in over 35 countries through Product Development Services and flexible IT solutions. Solaris Offgrid’s flagship PaygOps platform is an interoperable B2B SaaS which connects energy and utility appliances (solar devices, water-pumps, cookstoves, smart metres, e-bikes) and payment methods (Pay-as-you-go and Mobile Money) within a suite of enterprise applications or API services, to allow distributors to smoothly manage their operations and tackle their challenges at the last mile, thus enabling them to provide affordable essential products and services to millions of people at the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid.

About A2EI

The Access to Energy Institute (A2EI) is the first not-for-profit and collaborative research and development institute in the solar off-grid industry. It provides broad, reliable open-source data, as well as on-the-ground research and analysis of solar solutions, and software platforms to administer these. Additionally, A2EI develops and procures solar system and appliance prototypes and initiates pilot projects – aiming to provide widely scalable sustainable energy research and solutions as a common good. A2EI‘s focus is on productive use appliances for small businesses and smallholder farmers which will allow users to earn a stable income, generate jobs and create robust local economic networks. Simultaneously, we concentrate on solar solutions with a high potential to mitigate climate change, create a substantial added benefit for the environment, and improve peoples’ health.

A2EI Releases AAM Connect Smartphone App

The A2EI has released AAM Connect, a smartphone app that enables customers to monitor their solar system’s performance and track the live status of their AAM hybrid solar generator. It allows users to check on their payment plan, keep their system up-to-date and facilitates easy troubleshooting.

The live data available to customers includes solar input, grid input, load, and battery voltage.
For customers who are paying off their systems in instalments, the app will inform them about the remaining time until their next payment is due. Additionally, the solar generator’s firmware will be kept up-to-date via the app to ensure optimal performance as we continue to optimize our AAM systems. Future features of the app will encompass information about system health, remaining time till the battery is fully charged or needs recharging, as well as the ability to customize further settings.

The AAM solar generators have been distributed as part of our “Solar Killed the Generator Star” (SKGS) project, benefitting almost 1,000 customers in Nigeria to date – while being piloted in a number of other countries. The solar systems are primarily purchased by local business owners who, in order to power their shops during the persistent power outages of the national grid, previously relied on noisy, polluting and expensive to maintain fuel generators. By releasing the app, we are further improving customers’ user experience, giving them more control of their own power source – and are taking another step towards replacing Nigeria’s millions of fuel generators with affordable, reliable, and clean solar alternatives.

Check out the AAM Connect app here.

SKGS Project Update & Data Release Report

Because of unreliable grids, there are millions of small fuel generators in Nigeria that emit millions of tons of CO2 every year.

Following the analysis of the economics of these small fuel generators in Nigeria, the A2EI set out to provide the sector with an open source hardware solar business system that can replace the noisy, unhealthy fossil fuel generators.

Our customers call the solution the solar generator. We are providing these systems to the market with the brand name AAM.

Two years later, we have not only made the solar generator available, but already sold over 1,000 systems to local distributors, who are installing them, mostly at small businesses.

Every solar generator is sending real time data on consumption and system state, which allows the A2EI to share millions of data points with the sector as open source data.

The A2EI is pleased to now present a new data release and project update for our “Solar Killed the Generator Star (SKGS)” project.

Please download our SKGS Project Update and Data Release Report here.

Download the associated data and readme here.

Please reach out to us at datadatadata@a2ei.org in case of any questions, feedback, or further interest in collaborating.

WEBINAR: #StopGuessing - Revealing Clean Cooking Opportunities

Clean e-cooking has a tremendous ecological and socio-economic impact for previously underserved communities. And electric metering technologies have the potential to explicitly demonstrate that impact.

On Jan 27, 2022, we hosted a webinar discussing our recent Clean Cooking Data Release Report, our smart meter technology, current and future projects, and options to accelerate clean e-cooking with data – and provided the opportunity for Q&A.

Please find the Webinar presentation slides here.

Please download the full Clean Cooking Report here.

Access the associated 14 month dataset and further information here.

Please, do take a moment to let us know your feedback on the webinar by completing a short 3-minute survey.

Clean Cooking / Full Data Release Report

Are electric cooking appliances the future of clean cooking?

In our new comprehensive data release report, the A2EI analyses the entire data collected by our smart meters monitoring the usage of electric pressure cookers (EPCs) by 100 pilot users in rural Tanzania from March 2020 to May 2021.

Eighteen months have passed since the A2EI team, in collaboration with Nexleaf, Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS), and PowerGen, initiated the pilot project to help answer the question if electric cooking appliances are the future of clean cooking. One hundred participants located across six different mini-grid-connected villages were trained on the usage of EPCs and given EPCs connected to smart meters that monitored their usage.

In December 2020, A2EI released an energy consumption dataset collected by the smart meters during the first nine months. We are excited to now share an updated and final dataset that covers the entire fourteen month pilot.

The new data release report accompanies the data frames. Our research shows that many households have tangible interest in using electric cooking appliances and that these users can reap positive benefits from the appliance usage. The degree to which a user may access such benefits will depend on the broader context of their environment, such as the regulatory framework, grid design, and applicable electricity tariffs.

Download the full data release & ReadMe here:
raw data frames
ReadMe

Download the data release report here:

Clean Cooking Data Release Report #2

Please reach out to us at cleancooking@a2ei.org in case of any questions, feedback, or further interest in collaborating.

E-Mobility Adoption in Tanzania #1

How can e-mobility contribute to healthier and greener living conditions in African cities?

Fast urbanization rates and rapid growth of motorized traffic across the African continent lead to high levels of pollution and pose serious risks for people’s health, and the environment.

One of our entrepreneurs in residence, Tanzania-based eMobility as a Service startup Greenfoot, is working to transform Africa’s consumer markets by providing local businesses with affordable transportation solutions powered by 100% electric micro-mobility. Joining hands, Greenfoot and the A2EI are collaborating on a series of publications analyzing the feasibility and viability of e-mobility business models for East Africa.

In our first brief paper on the topic, we look at “boda bodas” (Swahili for motorcycle taxis) – a common means of transport in both rural and urban areas of East Africa. In many instances, boda boda riders cannot afford to buy their own motorcycles, but instead rent them for a daily rate from the owner. We wanted to see if there is a viable business case for electric motorcycles to replace petrol motorcycles which are leased by their owners and operated by riders as a taxi.

Please download our study & findings here.

Download the associated materials here.

Paper on the Adoption of EPCs among Mini-Grid Customers in Tanzania

A2EI recently published a paper in a special edition of Energies focused on clean energy innovations for low and middle income countries.

The paper, titled Tracking the Adoption of Electric Pressure Cookers among Mini-Grid Customers in Tanzania, investigates findings from A2EI’s clean cooking pilot conducted in 2020 in collaboration with MECS, Nexleaf, and Powergen RE.

Please find the full paper here Tracking the Adoption of EPCs among Mini-Grid Customers in Tanzania

Gold Standard Project Stakeholder Consultation

A2EI is in the process of certifying a Gold Standard project that is providing solar systems for small businesses and households across Nigeria. After having conducted a local stakeholder consultation meeting on the project we now invite stakeholders to provide additional feedback. Please find a detailed invitation and associated documents below.

Dear stakeholder,

As part of the Gold Standard project certification cycle and following the local stakeholder consultation meeting held in The Wells Carlton Hotel, 8 Gado Nasko Street, Asokoro, Abuja, Nigeria on 22/07/2021, the company Access to Energy Institute (A2EI) is pleased to invite you as stakeholder to provide comments and feedback as part of the StakeholderFeedback Round.

A2EI is the Coordinating and Managing Entity (CME) of the Programme of Activities (PoA) “Solar systems for small businesses and households by Access to Energy gGmbH (A2EI)” and will implement the carbon project activity ’Solar systems for small businesses and households – CPA01‘. Activities under the programme will disseminate solar photovoltaics-based electricity generation systems across all possible regions in Nigeria.

In the context of the carbon certification, a local stakeholder consultation (LSC) meeting was conducted and now the Stakeholder Feedback Round is being carried out. Please find the LSC report below. The documents are available in hard copy at Consistent Energy Limited, 5, Julius Gbigbi Street, Magodo GRA, Phase 1, Isheri, Lagos, Nigeria, and Creeds Energy, Suite A14, 7 Bozoum Street, off Adetokunbo Ademola Crescent, Wuse II Abuja.

You are welcomed to contact us by Email (Complaint@a2ei.org) or by phone (+2348024207468) in case you have any questions or you need additional information. Please provide any comments/feedback on the documents by December 14, 2021.

Download the LSC Report here.

Study of Hotplate & Grid Use in Rural Malawi

The Access to Energy Institute (A2EI) has been part of a feasibility study to pave the way for mass distribution of electric hotplates to rural households in Malawi. This is one of many data collection activities by A2EI in the clean cooking sector, which comprise of more than 1,000 smart meters in Asia, Africa and South America. The data collected by A2EI will make it easier to understand the underlying behaviors and drivers that would benefit the quality of life and health of millions of people.

The study of hotplate and grid use in rural Malawi is led by the non-profit climate protection organization Atmosfair together with the mini-grid operator Mulanje Electricity Generation Agency (MEGA) and Mulanje Renewable Energy Agency (MuREA). On the scientific side, researchers from the University of Strathclyde under UK Aid’s Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS) program have been involved as well.

A2EI provided 20 households with two smart meters each. One was connected to the grid and the second one was connected to a 1,500 W hotplate. Via the smart meters, the hotplate’s energy usage was monitored over a time span of four months from March to July 2021. The data collection part of the study has now been concluded and the distribution of electric hotplates that fit the needs of the participating households is about to begin. This next part of the study builds upon the lessons learned through the detailed analysis of our smart meter data and a couple of complementing surveys.

As the new hotplates arrive in Malawi, we are preparing to resume the data collection activities and support our partners in their analysis to verify the findings from the first part of the study.

Download the summary & learnings from the first stage of the study here.

Access the data release here.

Productive Use Machinery in Agriculture

Productive use appliances in agriculture have been the “next big thing” in the energy access sector for the best part of the last decade. However, only a few successful examples can be showcased and learned from. With Imara Tech as our first “Entrepreneur in Residence” at A2EI, we were lucky enough to be part of one of the successful ventures in the agricultural productive use appliance sector and want to share our learnings and propose a way forward that we believe could increase the likelihood for successful product development.

We found that the combination of thorough research on plausible business models for users/customers on the one hand and on the other hand R&D, testing, piloting and feedback loops with customers to validate the economic value of the product to them are key ingredients for a successful product development. In particular, combining the crucial local knowledge of what exact product is needed combined with access to international resources e.g. R&D and supply chains are important.

Please do get in touch with us if you would like to know more about the methodology and the research we have put forward or would want more details on the “Entrepreneur in Residence” scheme of the A2EI.

Download the summary of learnings here: Productive Use Machinery in Agriculture

A2EI shares Impact Survey Bot as an open source tool

We are pleased to announce that the Access to Energy Institute (A2EI) is sharing their Impact Survey Bot (ISB) as an open source tool!

Having thoroughly tested the ISB in our own energy sector work, we are excited to now be in the position to make the ISB openly available to the sector as a fully digital survey and customer relation tool, allowing for direct interaction with your target group.

The ISB:

• is flexible and simple to set up;
• offers fully digital and automated interaction, as well as data storage and analysis;
• allows for multiple languages and individual branding;
• can be used for anything from surveying to customer onboarding or remote troubleshooting.

For more information, please download the ISB Infosheet here.

Please get in touch with us via ISB@a2ei.org with any questions, feedback – and/or to discuss using the ISB for your projects.

Webinar Global Climate Impact Payments Platform (CLIPP)

On May 18th, the A2EI hosted a webinar discussing the methodology and features of our new global Climate Impact Payments Platform (CLIPP). Furthermore, practitioners from the industry (Dana Rysankova from the World Bank and Martijn Veen from SNV) and of our pilot partners (Tessa Lee from BBox) gave their assessment. Afterwards, participants were provided with the opportunity for Q&A and to join the discussion.

More on CLIPP here.

PoA Design Consultation for GS CDM PoA ‘Solar systems for small businesses and households’

A2EI will develop a carbon Programme of Activities that will be certified under the Clean Development Mechanism and the Gold Standard – and we are asking for stakeholder feedback. Please find the invitation for the PoA Design Consultation below:

Dear stakeholder,

The German company ‘Access to Energy Institute’ (A2EI) will develop a carbon Programme of Activities (PoA) called ‘Solar systems for small businesses and households’ which will be certified under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Gold Standard (GS). The PoA will cover several countries (for the list of countries, please see attached Non-Technical Summary) and may be extended to other countries later on. The objective of the PoA is the dissemination of solar photovoltaic based electricity generation systems to Small and Medium Enterprises and households replacing fossil fuel based generators.

We are interested in receiving your comments on the programme design at this early stage of PoA implementation so that we can further improve the programme design. Please find attached to this invitation the Non-Technical Summary of the PoA upon which we invite you to give your feedback.
You are invited to fill and send back the attached Feedback Form by 13th of June 2021 latest to allow us to take into account your suggestions.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us in case that you have any questions or requests for clarifications.
Please feel free to forward this invitation to other organizations or individuals who you consider as relevant stakeholder for this PoA and who might be interested in providing their feedback.

Please find the Non-Technical Summary of the PoA here.
Download the Feedback Form here.

Thank you very much in advance.

In case of any questions or requests for clarifications, please contact:
Johann Thaler
Managing Director
mkaarbon safari GmbH (consultant to A2EI)
Email: johannfranz.thaler@gmail.com

A2EI launches global Climate Impact Payments Platform (CLIPP)

The Access to Energy Institute has developed a new concept of “Climate Impact Payments”, complementing existing results-based financing (RBF) schemes to fund clean energy projects and to achieve substantial carbon mitigation. A report written in partnership with Open Capital Advisors is describing the mechanics of the approach and positioning it in the broader context of taking urgent action to combat climate change (SDG13) and achieving universal energy access (SDG7).

In order to put the concept into action, the A2EI has launched its global Climate Impact Payments Platform (CLIPP) pilot on May 1st. A2EI has partnered with five off-grid solar companies – Bboxx, Engie Energy Access, Victron, SunCulture and Lorentz Pumps – to test the platform specifically for productive use appliances (PUAs). A2EI’s own products will also be featured. The platform focuses on PUAs because they are very often directly in a position to achieve a positive climate effect by replacing a fossil fuel energy source or by empowering a user to better adapt to climate change.

At the core of the CLIPP is a data driven, fully automated set of algorithms which radically reduce the complexity of conventional RBF schemes. The processes embedded in the CLIPP use IoT and data analytics to validate installation, product and climate performance – drawing from detailed data reported automatically by the installed systems to CLIPP. Therefore, a real time verification and monitoring of the climate impact is possible – both at a single system and at an aggregate level. This transparently describes the impact directly linked to the funding and supports distributors to achieve a faster scaling of climate smart technologies.

CLIPP aims to show which processes benefit most from automation, digitization, and data gathering. This will help demonstrate the climate impact of the products in real time, increase the efficiency of donor funding, and streamline payments to recipients that have delivered an explicit, positive climate impact.

Thomas Gottschalk, A2EI, says, “The distributors of climate smart technologies feel the heat and head wind of daily execution in the field. Simultaneously they carry the full expectation to scale and achieve SDG7. We need to ensure that they can concentrate on the most difficult part of SDG7 which is sales and aftersales. Therefore we created CLIPP to significantly lower the barriers of participation and disbursement for data-enabled solar-powered productive use appliances. Working together with donors, solar companies and distributors, we strive to fight climate change while achieving the many benefits of sustainable energy for all by 2030.”

Tessa Lee, Bboxx, comments: “Bboxx is excited to be joining the A2EI CLIPP Initiative. We have co-built digital end-user subsidy programs in Togo and now in the DRC and have over 10 years of Bboxx experience with results-based funding programs across the world. There is now little doubt that to unlock potential through energy access for all off-grid customers, public subsidies are absolutely crucial. Specifically, CLIPP will help Bboxx deploy our 300W product to small business owners in Kenya, helping power their activities with reliable and affordable solar energy. The program will also showcase an innovative Smart Subsidy model for productive use technologies; one that is more scalable and therefore more impactful than other approaches.”

Yoann le Fol, Victron, adds: “At Victron, we designed innovative high power solar systems to offer SMEs located in off-grid or grid-edge areas a reliable solution to grow their business. We believe A2EI’s CLIPP is a powerful lever to diffuse efficiently such technologies and generate positive economic impacts at scale”.

Adrian Honey, Lorentz Pumps, comments: “Distributors of our products value the A2EI approach with their Climate Impact Payments as it rewards solutions that actually work in the field. The added technical governance ensures that only solutions that provide direct customer benefit are rewarded. This is good for the farmers and good for scaling climate positive product use appliances.”

Samir Ibrahim, SunCulture, says: “History shows us that if we want to see meaningful positive impact against climate change, food insecurity, and rural poverty, subsidies and RBF programs have to be part of the solution. We know that technologies work, and subsidies/RBF will help familiarize proven technologies for those who need them, and make them more affordable for millions of people.”

Gillian-Alexandre Huart, Engie Energy Access, elaborates: “We look forward to collaborate with A2EI in this RBF pilot program which will contribute to deliver on our shared ambition : electrifying off-grid communities throughout Africa with affordable, reliable and sustainable solutions.  The RBF Climate Impact Payment scheme focuses specifically on the productive use of appliances which is at the very core of ENGIE Energy Access’s off-grid business model.  The support from this program should considerably lower the cost of our 200 W solar kits, facilitating access for our customers to productive use solutions and income-generating activities.”

Download the publication here: A2EI/OCA Report – Climate Impact Payments Platform (CLIPP)

Sign up for the webinar here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hF16rK5SRVmei8t9rTqvhA

Please contact us via CLIPP@a2ei.org if you are interested in more information or if you want to join CLIPP as a distributor or supplier of data-enabled productive use appliances.

New Partnership with the IKEA Foundation

Unlocking solar energy to power farms and businesses in Africa

Our partnership with the IKEA Foundation will help people in Africa power their livelihoods and earn a decent income through solar energy.

About 80% of households in rural Africa still live without access to electricity. In recent years, more people have been able to buy small solar home systems. But solar systems large enough to power computers, fridges and agricultural equipment—such as water pumps and mills—are still not readily available. These appliances could help farmers and business owners become more productive, increase their incomes and make sure people in their communities have enough to eat.

Sharing research and knowledge

While there are solar-powered solutions on the market in Africa, it’s not always clear which are most appropriate and how they can be scaled up. Current solar systems and appliances in the market are still too expensive for end-users and there’s a lack of established distribution channels. They are often built for consumptive use rather than productive use that can improve livelihoods, education and healthcare for the communities using it. Enterprises in the solar off-grid sector tend to develop smaller systems that need less finance and costly research and development. Any research private enterprises conduct is carefully shielded from competitors.

Our partnership with the IKEA Foundation aims to bridge that gap and make data available to everyone in the sector. As a not-for-profit institute with a focus on collaboration, we work without the constraints of profit-orientation and competition. This allows us to gather large-scale data on solar appliances and build up an open-source knowledge platform.

Solar Killed the Generator Star

A2EI works on various different projects to support the sustainable energy sector –  through the Solar Killed the Generator Star project in Nigeria, A2EI aims to replace small-scale fuel generators with solar generators. There currently more than 20 million generators in the country, emitting more than 50 million tons of CO2 per year.

A2EI teams in Nigeria, Tanzania and Germany have gathered extensive data and engineered a robust and affordable solar generator large enough to power businesses and replace diesel generators. Certified technicians and local distributors partnering with A2EI are distributing, installing and maintaining these generators.

Smart meters help decision-making

In a second project, A2EI focuses agricultural machines. It conducts open-source research on and develops new solar-powered agricultural appliances. A third project concentrates on designing and installing remotely monitored meters and smart sensors to gather large-scale data. This enables the renewable energy sector to make informed decisions and develop affordable, sustainable and reliable solar solutions.

“A2EI is becoming the ‘go-to’ institute for the solar sector to bring open-source innovative, affordable and scalable solar solutions to the market,” says Jolanda van Ginkel, Programme Manager, Renewable Energy at the IKEA Foundation. “We are supporting their efforts because we want to enable small business owners and smallholder farmers in Africa to improve their income and afford a better life, while reducing and avoiding greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.”

Learn more about the IKEA Foundation here.

First #SKGS solar technicians trained

In Nigeria, 20 million small fuel generators emit more than 50m tons of CO2 per year. Within our “Solar Killed the Generator Star” project, we have engineered an optimal “solar generator” system – designed to affordably replace dirty, noisy, and polluting fuel generators.

We ensure all technicians get trained to fully comprehend the system features, setup and installation, as well as the A2EI Chatbot & PayGo features. We’re excited to have trained the first cohort of #SKGS technicians that are now installing and servicing the technology out in the field!

The technicians from our first couple of trainings will be serving Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. We’re looking forward to many more successful training classes this year – and to distribute affordable, reliable solar generators throughout the country to boost the solar revolution in Nigeria!

A2EI and MECS to Monitor 1,000 eCooking Devices Globally

The Access to Energy Institute and the MECS (Modern Energy Cooking Services) programme are proud to announce a strategic collaboration to record data on the real usage of electric cooking devices in emerging markets.

Together, A2EI and MECS will deploy data logging devices onto electric cooking appliances in areas where the use of polluting fuels such as charcoal, firewood and kerosene is currently commonplace. Through remote monitoring, A2EI and MECS will gather data that reveals how real users are utilizing electric cooking appliances and generate insights on the opportunities and barriers to scaling electric cooking appliances globally.

This collaboration builds on ongoing cooperation between A2EI and MECS. In 2020, the organizations conducted a joint pilot project to monitor electric pressure cooker usage in 100 households connected to solar mini-grids in Tanzania. That research revealed insights around how electric cooking appliances might scale in off-grid contexts and how pricing influences cooking behavior. Find out more details on that research in the A2EI’s clean cooking data release report and the accompanying webinar.

Now the two organizations hope to extend their collaborative research into new projects, such as the MECS-supported ECO projects and larger-scale RBFs, as well as third-party pilots and studies. By expanding this data monitoring methodology to new contexts around the world, A2EI and MECS hope to create a rich data set that will draw the clean cooking and electrification sectors together towards the achievement of SDG7.

A2EI’s research on clean cooking has focused on understanding user behavior and using data to create evidence-based cases for the adoption of electric cooking appliances.

Do you have an eCooking pilot project that would benefit from better data? If so, please contact A2EI via cleancooking@a2ei.org, or read more about what we can offer here.

About MECS
MECS is a £40m UK-Aid funded research and innovation programme designed to find innovative solutions that can enable the 3 billion people who still cook primarily with biomass to transition directly to cooking with modern energy. MECS seeks to change the narrative in the clean cooking and electrification sectors, that for decades, the world has seen as two separate problems. Enormous progress has been made with respect to electrification in recent years, with fewer than 1 billion now without access, however clean cooking has lagged behind.

Meanwhile, a suite of transformative new technologies and business models has been developed to enable electric cooking in off-grid and weak-grid environments. The increasing viability of electric cooking solutions has given rise to a strategic opportunity to tackle both problems together by integrating planning and action on both these global energy access challenges with energy-efficient electric cooking.

The MECS programme is currently supporting an array of electric cooking pilots, including:

• Cooking diary studies carried out by MECS Country Partners to understand the cooking culture in each MECS Priority Country and the compatibility of different energy-efficient eCooking appliances.
• Electric Cooking Outreach (ECO) Challenge Fund Projects, which aim to trial specific energy-efficient eCooking appliances and develop locally appropriate business models that can bring them to market at scale.
• Larger-scale pilots tied into Results Based Financing programmes as a mechanism to facilitate the development of supply chains for energy-efficient eCooking appliances.

Clean Cooking Webinar

Are electric cooking appliances the future of clean cooking?

In our Clean Cooking Report, the A2EI explored the usage of electric pressure cookers on remote mini-grid sites in Tanzania.

On Feb 18 we hosted a webinar discussing the report, our smart meter and WhatsApp bot technologies and future clean cooking projects & cooperation possibilities – and provided the opportunity for Q&A.

Download the presentation slides here.

Clean Cooking Data Release

Are electric cooking appliances the future of clean cooking?

In a new report, the Access to Energy Institute explores the usage of electric pressure cookers on remote mini-grid sites in Tanzania through analysis of 9 months of pilot data collected from 100 smart meters and pilot users. The preliminary findings and a publicly available data set from the pilot are available here.

Download the data release report here: Clean Cooking Data Release Report

Download the Data & ReadMe here:
raw data frames
ReadMe

Productive Use Webinar

In our webinar, lead author Elliot Avila presented the A2EI’s productive use report and methodology – and answered questions from stakeholders from within the off-grid solar sector.

In case you missed it, or you would like to look back on it, please watch the recording above!

Download the presentation slides here.

Productive Use Report

What makes or breaks a successful solar productive use appliance? And why haven’t productive use appliances scaled as much as we all hoped?

The Access to Energy Institute has developed a systematic methodology and published a report to jointly discuss this – and to help find solutions for successful adoption and scaling.

Download the report here: Productive Use Report – Agricultural Technologies

(Click here to view its associated materials.)

A2EI partners with Greenfoot Africa

We are pleased to announce our collaboration with Greenfoot Africa, a recently launched Tanzania-based startup providing a 100% electric motorcycle pickup and delivery service.

Greenfoot is aiming to prototype a sustainable and affordable solution for Africa’s transport problems. Over 40% of Africans live in urban areas where underdeveloped road and public transport infrastructure result in congested cities. Faced with slow-moving traffic, Africans have turned to motorcycles for 75% of their transport needs.

Although the affordability and agility of motorcycles make them ideal for African consumers, they emit huge amounts of pollutants: 16 times more hydrocarbons, 3 times more carbon monoxide, and a disproportionately high amount of other air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions compared to passenger vehicles.

Greenfoot Africa’s vision is to lead Africa’s transition to electric mobility and reduce congestion and pollution in African cities. It aims to empower local businesses to go green and be more efficient by providing smart services powered by electric motorcycles and other light vehicles. The service will be enhanced by data analytics, geo-tracking, and mobile and web-based applications.

Greenfoot’s pilot project aims to establish a proof of concept for the commercial use of electric vehicles in urban areas, starting with electric motorcycles offering pick-up and delivery services in Arusha. Customers will make their orders through Greenfoot’s online platform, which handles order disbursement and payment processes. Riders can easily recharge their bikes by swapping the battery at the Greenfoot hub.

The A2EI is supporting Greenfoot with technical and research expertise. Over a 6-month pilot period, data will be collected on the utilization of electric vehicles and demand for services. We strive to gather reliable data on the electric motorcycles’ usage patterns, what their charging costs and challenges are, and which energy mix is most viable for the electric transport sector. In the future, the A2EI aims for life-cycle assessments of the electric motorcycle transport model, analyzing the motorcycle’s carbon footprint in terms of production, transport and recycling challenges.

The private sector will play an important role in the widespread adoption of electric vehicles, but the market is still at an early stage. The A2EI empowers entrepreneurs to explore nascent technologies and innovative business models, but captures those learnings to benefit the sector. By working closely with Greenfoot Africa as an exciting example of an affordable electric transport service, we are analyzing the business model’s viability to substitute the millions of fuel-powered motorcycles currently operating on East Africa’s roads – and thus help pave the way towards a zero-carbon transport economy.

Learn more about Greenfoot: www.greenfootgo.com

Analysis of generator usage during COVID-19

Following the rising fears of the spread of the novel coronavirus in Nigeria, on March 30th, the Nigerian government imposed a lockdown in the country’s largest city, Lagos, neighboring Ogun state, and the capital, Abuja.

We wanted to find out how the lockdown affected generator usage and people’s energy consumption patterns – and prepared and analyzed the data we gathered from our smart meters installed on generators in Abuja and in Lagos.

Download our Analysis of Generator Usage during COVID-19 Lockdown in Abuja & Lagos here.

A2EI develops WhatsApp Bot

The A2EI is currently working on the development of a bot, which uses the messenger WhatsApp as the main channel to communicate with customers/team/researchers. Using a WhatsApp Bot (WAB) is simpler and more effective than developing a separate app, which may not fit all smartphone operating systems.

As nearly everyone has WhatsApp either already on their smartphones, or can easily download it, the WAB is seamlessly scalable.

The WAB will primarily be used to accompany the installation and failure checklists for our smart meters. This should streamline the installation process and maintenance of thousands of smart meters.

In the future, we see great potential for the use of the WAB in other areas of customer service and customer support. Fast, low-threshold and simple communication is possible with a WAB and can cover a great number of customers and co-workers questions and requests.

We believe bots are a game changer in how the energy access sector is communicating with customers and can streamline the maintenance of solar systems.

Wrap-up GOGLA Olympics 2020

While we currently work from home to keep everyone safe – let us remember and cherish the fantastic memories & energy from the GOGLA Olympics 2020!!

We can’t wait to see you all in person again – here is to sector-wide collaboration and partnerships!!

A2EI data release #2

We are pleased to announce the arrival of our second data release! For this release, we stuck to what was done best: the smart-metering of generators and grids. This version improves upon the last release in several aspects.

Firstly, the number of smart meters in the field has increased. You’ll find 216 individual smart meters amongst the new dataset. With this increase in data quantity comes increased confidence in conclusions derived from the dataset. When it comes to data, there is power in numbers!

Secondly, we’ve expanded and improved upon our data schema. Within the dataset, you will find a new column, frequency. Additionally, in the attached smart meter list, you will find new information regarding connected generator size, as well as a unique identifier representing the account, or location, a smart meter is connected. This helps track the movement of the meter if it changes location or generator, or was at some point put out of service.

Lastly, we’re making constant improvements to our data collection and storage ecosystem. As we continue to migrate more and more meters to our new platform, we achieve greater data reliability and reduce transmissions errors.

Additionally, as a sneak preview, we’ve installed 100 of our smart meters on electric pressure cookers in Tanzania and are looking forward to sharing the first set of usage and consumption data with you later in July this year.

Download the executive summary of the data release here.

View the associated data here.

The A2EI welcomes Ify Malo as an advisory board member

We are honored to welcome Ify Malo, CEO of Clean Tech Hub and the Energy Innovation Center in Abuja, Nigeria, as an advisory board member. We are thrilled to be able to draw from her extensive knowledge in the energy access sphere of Sub Saharan Africa and Nigeria in particular. Ify’s simultaneously well-calibrated academically, and yet her down-to-earth and hands-on approach greatly positions her ideally to support the A2EI’s mission to develop data-backed solar-powered solutions and appliances to boost economic growth and socioeconomic development of communities and businesses across the continent.

As the CEO of the Clean Tech Hub and the Energy Innovation Center, Ify heads a prominent social enterprise and an energy access incubator for new ideas, technologies and business models across Sub Saharan Africa. She is also the Country Campaign Director for Power For All in Nigeria, where she leads the Nigerian campaign to promote distributed renewable energy as the fastest and most cost effective means to universal energy access.

One of Africa’s principal energy access experts, Ify has initiated, lead and implemented several initiatives and programs in regards to delivering energy access to communities in Nigeria, and provided market entry and business support services to a multitude of companies. An experienced growth market entrepreneur and design thinking expert, she draws from extended experience within senior government and policy level positions, and has worked extensively on issues surrounding energy access and climate change, tech innovation, poverty alleviation, gender mainstreaming and stakeholder partnership initiatives.

Ify has, amongst others, previously consulted for the European Union, DFID, USAID, GOGLA, Practical Action, WoMIN, and the World Bank. She currently serves as a member on several boards, including Greenpeace International, Norrenberger Financial Services, Extractive 360 and the UNEP GEO for business Advidory Council. Ify is an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellow and seats on the programme nomination and selection committees. She is also an Eisenhower Fellow and a Global Leadership Academy Fellow.

We warmly welcome Ify as our advisory board member – and we are eager to jointly discuss the further development of our “Solar Killed the Generator Star” project in Nigeria, our #StopGuessing approach to data gathering and analysis, as well as the testing and development of a range of solar-powered cooking solutions, agricultural machines and productive use appliances.

Learn more about the members of our advisory board here.

Evaluation of Solar Powered Agricultural Technologies

The Access to Energy Institute has released a preview of upcoming research into solar-powered agricultural technologies. The released paper evaluates the productive-use potential of solar-powered oil extraction and coffee pulping machines by modeling small businesses and their finances.

Download the paper here: Evaluation of Solar Powered Agricultural Technologies for Productive-Use Applications: A Modeling Approach

Click here to: view its associated materials.

Data sharing announcement

Prior to the Global Off-Grid Solar Forum and Expo in Nairobi next week, the A2EI is pleased to announce its progress in data collection, expansion of its data team, and industry-wide cooperation.

Read more here:

First A2EI Info Briefing

Did you miss out on what’s been going on at the A2EI in the past months?

No worries, we’ve got you covered.

Just check out our 1st info briefing here!

Would you like to receive future briefings? Sign up via www.a2ei.org/newsletter

Interview with Rachel Kyte

Rachel Kyte, one of our advisory board members, has switched hats this week.

After almost 4 years as Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and CEO of Sustainable Energy for All, she was named dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Ahead of this transition, we have conducted a short interview with Rachel about her learnings in her UN roles – and would now like to share it with you.

Q1: You have been heading SEforALL for almost 4 years. Biggest win/fail?

Win – greater shared sense of direction on a critical path to deliver universal energy access – affordably, reliably, cleanly.

Fail – not enough movement of money to make big bets on grid densification, and distributed renewables. Still too many people making disastrous bets on fossil fuel infrastructure based on bad data and a lack of imagination and an international community that hasn’t showed up fit for purpose – yet.

Q2: SDG7 will be achieved in 2030, says Thomas Gottschalk from A2EI (based on Economies of Scale and low price of tier 1 products). Do you share his optimism?

If it isn’t no other goal will be either – health care with no power? Education rates going up with no connectivity, computer or warmth in winter? Agricultural productivity up with no drop per crop irrigation and no cold storage? I would rather be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right.

Q3: What are the three things that need to happen to boost the offgrid solar space (beyond solar lights?)

Domestic finance to fund the country’s future in countries where the access gap is large and where domestic banks and other pools of capital are not invested in their own energy future.

Serious commitment at scale across those countries where progress is needed most of development finance for market creation support and a re pooling of all the funding already committed for clean energy solutions so that it will take more risk, be more patient and more flexibly deployed. We have no time.

There is room for everyone – grid densification, mini grids, micro grids, stand alone solar home systems – and we need more efficient pumps and appliances. Focus on building markets and support for the poorest and stop having arguments about whose handpicked solution is right.

Q4: What’s your most important lesson learned from SE4All to inspire the next generation of global leaders at Fletcher?

LISTEN and ASK GOOD QUESTIONS – all my learning came from listening to entrepreneurs, consumers, people putting money at risk, women community leaders and social entrepreneurs (including the A2EI’s Thomas’s) and cross-referencing that with the data that said different things and had become received wisdom. The data sets informing decision making are often gender blind, curated by government only, wildly off every year, presented in a way that no one who needed it would read it. From there we focused on marshaling data and evidence and asking different questions of it – the questions that come from an assumption that we were serious when we agreed that by 2030 we would have universal access.

Q5: How radical do you want/allow your children to be to fight climate change? 

Radical means to go to the root. I hope my children will enquire to get to the root of the problem – whatever that problem or challenge will be – including the climate emergency and then respectfully do whatever it takes to help find solutions.

Q6: What can/should good lobbyists (e.g. solar) learn from bad lobbyists (e.g. fossil fuel)?

They may be bad but they are good. They have long term goals and commit to those goals. They are disciplined.

So, follow the money. Understand the data and evidence. Understand where others are coming from. Don’t talk down to people. People should be scared, but they must be empowered to make different choices to protect their families and communities.

#StopGuessing

Read our CEO Thomas Gottschalk’s #StopGuessing article in Sun-Connect News: Solar system and productive use appliance development without data is guesswork – How data guides smart engineering.

Welcome to the A2E Lab

Karibuni sana!

Based in Arusha, Tanzania, the Access to Energy Lab is an innovative space where researchers and engineers collaborate to bring new clean energy products to life.

The A2E Lab team consists of eight full-time researchers and engineers who are supported by a dynamic cast of partners, part-time researchers, student interns, and visiting entrepreneurs. The Lab is equal parts office desks, workshop benches, and meeting spaces and everyone who visits is encouraged to make full use of the space to explore their ideas.

“The goal is to bring curious minds together in one place and give them the structure and resources that bring their ideas to the next level,” says Lab Director Elliot Avila. “It’s a room full of people completely open to sharing their ideas, experience, and skills with one another and that kind of free exchange is how we can create something new.”

Behind the scenes, there is a method to the madness. Drawing upon previous experience in the private sector, the team follows a product development process that encourages them to consider how downstream stakeholders will use their work.

“I have never done research like this before. There’s a strong focus on technical topics,” said Senior Research Associate Ansila Kweka. “We start our research with a sandbox phase, which is a preliminary study to get a general overview of a topic. This helps us to understand how to focus our research and come up with clear conclusions that inform the R&D process.”

The A2E Lab is applying this process to a number of products, ranging from clean cook stoves to motor controllers to oil presses. Being located in Tanzania allows the team to involve users throughout their research, design, and testing, which helps ensure new products are compatible with local preferences.

Still less than a year old, the A2E Lab continues to grow and will add two new staff by the beginning of October. The additions will enable the team to push forward new projects, including researching the environmental impact of solar water pumps, collecting quantitative data on rural household energy expenditure for clean cooking, and beginning the design phase of different solar-powered agricultural equipment. And with each of these projects, the team hopes to bring positive change in the lives of others.

“We are trying to understand challenges of products and how we can improve them to bring more impact to the community,” said Operations Associate Binde Mohamed. “Everything we do, we want to have impact.”

Visitors to Arusha are welcome to drop by the A2E Lab, located in the Nane Nane grounds in Njiro. The Lab space is easily recognizable by its eye-catching pink trim.

SELCO Foundation & A2EI Partnership

The needs of smallholder farmers and micro-businesses in terms of energy access and productive use appliances in India and countries in Sub Sahara Africa are often very similar.

The A2EI and Selco Foundation want to learn from each other’s wealth of experience (having worked with the needs of rural and peri-urban small businesses and farmers) to jointly create appropriate livelihood solutions.

In September 2019 a strategic partnership was initiated between A2EI and SELCO Foundation to develop, test and deploy selected solar powered efficient machines that can augment chosen agricultural value chains. The partnership also aims to establish and implement protocols for data logging and analysis on productive agri-tech applications.

In the first phase A2EI and SELCO Foundation aim to leverage each others strengths of efficient technology development and rural dissemination models by collaborating on R&D, design and deployment of solar powered energy-efficient machines for flour and spice grinding that is suited for enhancing incomes of farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, farmer producer groups etc. Three such income generating applications will be identified and developed through the partnership.

Monitoring and data logging efforts through the program will aim to provide practitioners insights on ways to optimize existing or new agri-processing solutions for small and marginal farmers. By using remote monitoring, data will be collected and used as inputs for product and system improvement. This will enable the partners to determine aspects like need-based and appropriate system design, sizing, expected repayment rate etc with more accuracy. And by using sensors to measure throughput, analysis on the efficiency of the machines under different operating conditions will help determine features like optimal operating speed and motor specifications.

The mutual work that A2EI and Selco Foundation are engaging in aims to directly benefit under-served end users by providing access to clean energy driven efficient solutions. Beyond this, the goal of the partnership is to share findings with the broader sustainable energy community, in the hope that the work, learnings and solutions can be spread to a much wider user base of smallholder farmers and micro-businesses worldwide.

Learn more about the SELCO Foundation:  www.selcofoundation.org

First A2EI Advisory Board formed

We are very happy and honored to announce the composition of the A2EI’s advisory board today!

Rather than setting up a board from day one, we decided to initially achieve a certain materiality, i.e. by setting up our first projects and research focuses, before convening a group of advisors to help us steer the A2EI.

Our Solar Killed the Generator Star project in Nigeria, our research into solar cooking and agricultural business applications, along with our focus on data loggers and quantitative technical data demonstrate the current array of capabilities of the A2EI.

Now that the A2EI has successfully launched, the road ahead, the focus, and the goals need to be made more explicit and the strategy refined.

To that effect, we have asked the four people we trust most in this industry to accompany the development of the A2EI as advisory board members. While all four are also friends, we feel very privileged to be able to tap into their aggregate knowledge, instinct, experience and wisdom.

We are absolutely delighted to start the joint strategic discussion with them on where we collectively think the A2EI currently is, will be – and should be to make an ambitious, lasting difference in the solar offgrid space.

Find out more about the A2EI advisory board here: www.a2ei.org/advisory-board

A2EI seeks stakeholder input for agricultural machine ranking

Deadline: open end

Want clear answers on productive-use agricultural equipment?

The Access to Energy Institute is commencing a new research project to identify, evaluate, and improve solar-powered, productive-use technologies that strengthen rural livelihoods.

A2EI is seeking stakeholder input to narrow the focus of the research to the technologies that are most relevant to the off-grid industry and its customers.

Share your ideas here: Agricultural Machine Ranking

New report on replacing fossil fuel generators

Dalberg Advisors and the Access to Energy Institute released a joint piece of research today that is investigating how solar solutions can substitute for fuel generators in Nigeria over the next couple of years.

The report, “Putting an End to Nigeria’s Generator Crisis: The Path Forward”, takes a data-driven approach to describe the current generator market and economics – and what would need to happen for a major switch to solar.

The report can be downloaded here.

“Solar Killed the Generator Star” Project

With less than 5GW of capacity on the grid, Nigeria is experiencing a substandard delivery of energy which is constraining growth and development. In parallel, around 25 million small fuel powered generators of less than 2 kWp are providing for a back-up energy access infrastructure. This represents the equivalent of at least 25GW of 100% fossil fuel based energy infrastructure.

Around 100 million liters of fuel are needed daily to run Nigeria’s generators. The associated emissions are around 85 million tons of CO2 a year. Generators are not a satisfactory solution to Nigeria’s energy crisis. They are, however, currently the only available technology to ensure energy access when the grid is down.

One Possible Solution: The Solar Generator

The devices and appliances typically powered by small generators can technically of course be powered by a solar system. However, no suitable solar substitute has scaled in the Nigerian market yet – despite the obvious demand and the huge potential for noise, fume and CO2 emissions reduction.

This is why the Access to Energy Institute (A2EI) has decided to dedicate its core resources to work on providing a standalone solar generator to substitute the “betta pass my neighbor” traditional fuel generator within the next two years. We call the project “Solar Killed the Generator Star” and have kickstarted it in Nigeria in April 2019.

We firmly believe the A2EI can develop a solar generator that:
• technically does what a traditional fuel generator does,
• avoids noise, fumes and CO2 emissions, and
• is affordable.

Data Monitoring and Open Source Availability

As a not-for-profit organization, the A2EI strives to share all the information it is gathering with like-minded innovators (be they commercial players or not) in the offgrid solar sector. We explicitly invite partners interested in how to reduce the fossil fuel footprint in the energy access sector in Nigeria to join our efforts.

In a first step, the A2EI has developed special data loggers that can be plugged onto a generator or the grid and that will generate real time 24/7 data series on grid availability, generator usage patterns, consumption, CO2 emissions and real costs. About 150 of these data loggers have already been installed in Nigeria. In addition to smart meters, we have installed air quality monitoring devices that log data on CO, CO2, NO2, SO2, VOC, PM 2.5 etc, and meters measuring the noise pollution emanating from the generators.

To our knowledge, this breadth of data has never been gathered nor made available to interested parties. We believe this is one of the reasons why no suitable solution to generator replacement has been made available to date.

In parallel to gathering “technical” data, we are currently interviewing hundreds of households and shop owners that are using a generator regarding their usage patterns and costs etc. The data will be made available through the website of the Access to Energy Institute (www.a2ei.org/data). We hope this will stimulate not only the discussion around solar as the right technology to replace fuel generators, but also trigger and foster the much-needed hardware and prototyping innovation necessary to develop the right solar substitution generator.

If you are interested in getting access to the data gathered on the usage of generators in Nigeria, please register with your email here.

Read more about the project here.

PS: The A2EI and Dalberg will be releasing a joint report on the Economics of the Generator in Nigeria next week during the GOGLA/SE4ALL conferences in Amsterdam, Stay tuned!

The Desirability of Clean Cooking in Off-Grid Households

Research was conducted to understand the desirability of electric cook stoves and whether off-grid households in countries like Tanzania would be willing to switch to clean cooking technologies. The purpose of this research is to understand the desirability of electric cooking methods in relation to biomass cooking methods. We believe that if electric cooking methods are more desirable than conventional biomass cooking methods, then users will freely adopt them. However, if they are less desirable, the design of the technology must be improved before its benefits can be realized.

The primary goal of this research is to determine if off-grid households want to switch to electric cooking methods. Therefore, our research objectives were to:

• Understand the time, ease of use, and cost implications of conventional cooking behaviors (wood and charcoal)

• Understand the time and ease of use of electric cooking methods

Download the full report here.