Exponential Energy

When many of us think of energy, we imagine coal mines, oil rigs, pipelines, electrical lines and other costly infrastructure. However, this is not how clean energy is arriving in the developing world. Instead, it’s arriving in lightweight, flexible, decentralized, connected units at the community or household level, built on top of digital technologies.

M-Kopa, for example, supplies households in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda with home-based solar systems. These systems are 10% cheaper than energy supplied by both the national grid and kerosene lamps and are estimated to save a household up to a year’s worth of income over three years. M-Kopa just closed $17 million in financing to reach one million more customers in East Africa by 2017.

Clean energy is arriving in lightweight, flexible, decentralized, connected units at the community or household level, built on top of digital technologies.

Similarly, companies in Bangladesh, a country known for its leading role in the developing world solar revolution, are currently selling an estimated 35,000 home-based solar units per month and one expert believes they will cover the whole country with solar by 2021. Individuals and slum dwellers are taking things even further in Vietnam, where villages are hacking together wind power systems to reduce the cost of energy in their villages by 30%. And a group of Vietnamese farmers recently hacked together their own solar powered fishing boats.

While at first glance these might seem like one-off efforts, they are more likely early indicators of a new energy infrastructure that may become mainstream.

These local energy units are built with solar panels, batteries, materials, and computers — to varying extents, the cost of these will continue to go down while increasing in capacity and sophistication. Further, cost declines are supported by the fact these technologies use more easily harvested, widely available, and nearly limitless resources (solar and wind), in comparison to fossil fuels which are more difficult to extract and more limited in supply. In the next few years, we will see these decentralized systems scale and also become more sturdy and sophisticated.

We are just now starting to see the benefits of exponential energy technologies reach the poorest of the poor both in terms of supplying power and saving money.

Even more importantly, the most impoverished people are becoming the future creators of technology and owners of their own energy supplies. Given that energy is also essential to healthcare, education, food, water, shelter, sanitation and more, we should expect to see a huge leap in human development and well-being in the developing world in the next decade.

But this is just the beginning.

These new systems are being built on the digital technologies that will form a new smart energy infrastructure called the Internet of Energy.