Solar electricity utility in box chosen as finalist
Power for off-grid, inaccessible communities
AFRICA’S best new engineering innovations include an “electricity utility in a box” designed by a Joburg team for remote communities.
The Standard Microgrid is built around a shipping container, with solar panels, batteries to store the power and connections for customers. It’s a pick up and deliver service.
“A woman in rural Zambia will pay 100 times what a woman in New York will pay to charge her cellphone,” said Matt Wainwright, a UCT graduate and chartered accountant who turned into an energy entrepreneur so he could make more of a difference in development in Africa.
“There’s a massive poverty premium that happens because of the inefficiency, so the woman in Zambia is paying a roadside battery bank US50c (nearly R7) for a small amount of electricity, but because it’s worth it to her, that’s what she’s willing to pay.”
Wainwright and colleagues Brian Somers and Matthew Alcock of Standard Microgrid have designed a containerised solar-powered microgrid to provide power to homes and small businesses in remote areas that don’t have access to traditional electricity grids.
They are one of 12 finalists for the 2015/16 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, which is run by the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering. Finalists were announced this week.
The Standard Microgrid team wanted “to enforce highvalue energy usage” so, rather, than the Eskom-style model of massive and prohibitively expensive power stations, they designed the smaller generat- ing units aimed at individual off-grid communities.
The communities are involved in the management of the system, reducing costs.
The Joburg-based team started a year ago, and ended up having to design both their own hardware and software because they couldn’t find anything appropriate. Now they’ve finished the prototyping and development, and are building a unit in Joburg for the first pilot project in rural Zambia.
“We’ve built it around a container so it can be assembled and moved into a rural area relatively easily. We used the shipping container as the basis for the structure that the solar panels sit on,” said Wainwright. “It’s a low-cost, really efficient smartgrid.”
The business model means they don’t sell kilowatt hours, but a specific set of energy services tailored to individual customers’ needs.
The power isn’t intended for heating and cooking, as Wainwright said those could be done better in other ways. Instead, it is for fridges, cellphone chargers, lighting, small grain mills and some power tools.
The customers explain what they want the power for and when they’re likely to use it, and a programme is customised to their needs, priced accordingly and achieves optimal grid usage.
“They can’t cheat, so we enforce really efficient energy usage,” said Wainwright.
Each microgrid unit costs about $60 000 (R828 000) and provides 85 connections, which each serve five or six people, so each microgrid directly benefits more than 425 people.
They are able to provide power 20 percent cheaper than the best alternative that those off-grid communities currently have, as they rely on expensive mixes of paraffin, candles, batteries, diesel generators and roadside battery banks. The microgrid is also more reliable and cheaper.
It’s a scalable design, which means extra units can be added as needed.
The intention is to build a commercial model from the standardised system.
“Our goal is to deploy to 200 villages a year within the next five years,” said Wainwright.