NEWS POST: A Pay-As-You-Go Solar Solution Could Kickstart Renewable Energy Adoption In Nigeria

A mini solar grid installed in Edo state, Nigeria by Arnergy. Image credit: Arnergy

THIS POST IS NOT SPONSORED

Nigeria’s electricity problems are well-documented. Only 18% of the working connections in Africa’s largest economy enjoy reliable electricity supply.

With the national grid largely unreliable and, in some places, non-existent, Nigerians have been typically forced to generate their own electricity for homes and businesses with expensively maintained gasoline-powered generators. In 2009, half of the country was estimated to own generator sets. The country’s electricity woes go on despite government’s plans to spend up to US$13.5billion over the last 16 years.

Renewable energy has been touted as an alternative but despite success stories from East Africa, its adoption in Nigeria has been held back by two major barriers. “There is a perceived risk that solar power ‘does not work’ as many have doubted the efficacy of the technology,” Femi Adeyemo, CEO of Arnergy, a solar energy solutions company, says. “This, alongside the high cost, has typically made it a less attractive option for most Nigerians.”

This was a lesson Adeyemo learned alongside his co-founder Kunle Odebunmi when Arnergy kicked off operations in 2014. But the duo have now changed approach and launched a solar energy pay-as-you-go subscription model in Africa’s largest economy. Calling it a “solar rental system”, Arnergy allows customers in urban centers to lease solar equipment rather than purchase them while paying a fixed price (US$30 per month) for the electricity generated and consumed. This solution, Adeyemo says helps “resolve the problem of high upfront costs.” With lower acquisition costs, the founders hoped more Nigerians will become disposed to adopting solar energy. The gamble appears to be paying off as Adeyemo says the company’s revenue for the year is projected to grow tenfold owing to vastly increased demand.

Arnergy’s pay-as-you-go solar power solution is novel in Africa’s largest economy and could help it stand out in a competitive market. With a majority of Nigerians unable to purchase solar power systems outright owing to its high costs, solar energy providers jostle in a small market. To increase their target market, many solar energy firms have taken to focusing their services on powering commercial and industrial outfits with deeper pockets.

While it has been a successful experiment in urban centers, Arnergy’s pay-as-you-go solution has proven more expedient in rural areas, where the electrification rate is 37% according to data from the International Energy Agency. Backed by Nigeria’s Bank of Industry, the firm deployed solar mini-grids across three previously off-grid villages in Nigeria, connecting and metering homes with end users paying less than $10 monthly for enough electricity to power LED light bulbs, a television and fan as well as charge mobile phones daily. With its rural projects now powering 600 homes across those three villages, Odebunmi says the company plans to replicate this model across the country. The company has already had state governments expressing interest in funding the deployment of Arnergy’s solution to boost electrification in their states.

Two young Nigerian innovators, Femi Adeyemo, and Kunle Odebunmi, have broken fresh frontiers in the renewable energy sector

While its operations in the rural areas are backed by the Bank of Industry which has also provided US$600,000 in funding, the firm also received a US$146,000 grant from the Solar Nigeria Programme, a UK Department for International Development funded initiative, in 2015. To meet customer demand which currently outstrips their capacity and stock, the founders are looking to raise more capital to accelerate growth. There’s just one problem: the founders say renewable energy is not yet considered a high growth area by investors. “Most venture capital firms in Nigeria currently prefer to invest in tech start-ups,” Adeyemo says.

Originally published in QUARTZ AFRICA

NEWS POST: In Israeli Desert, World's Highest Solar Tower Looks To Future

Critics have panned the Ashalim solar tower project as too expensive and complex compared to other renewable energy solutions ©Jak Guez (AFP)

In the middle of southern Israel's desert, engineers are hard at work building the world's tallest solar tower, reflecting the country's high hopes for renewable energy.

Once completed in late 2017, the Ashalim Tower will rise to 240 metres (787 feet), taller than Paris's Montparnasse Tower and London's Gherkin, according to the Israeli government and the consortium building it.

Covered in stainless steel, the square tower in the rocky Negev desert with a peak resembling a giant lighthouse will be visible from dozens of kilometres (miles) away.

A field of mirrors covering 300 hectares (740 acres) -- the size of more than 400 football pitches -- will stretch out from its base, directing sunlight toward the tower's peak to an area called the boiler, which looks like a giant lightbulb.

The boiler, whose temperature will rise to 600 degrees Celsius (1112 Fahrenheit), generates steam that is channelled towards the foot of the tower, where electricity is produced.

The construction, costing an estimated €500 million (US$570 million), is being financed by US firm General Electric, with France's Alstom and Israeli private investment fund Noy also involved.

Israel's government launched a tender for the project in 2013, committing to purchase electricity from it over 25 years as part of a shift towards renewable energy and energy independence.

- Clean at a cost -

The country mainly generates electricity using plants fired by coal, natural gas and fuel oil. Its domestic supply of natural gas has grown with the discovery of fields in the Mediterranean.

Solar requires a major investment, though costs are gradually coming down.

Energy from a solar tower is "two to three times more expensive to produce than classic electricity plants using carbon or fuel", said Eran Gartner, who heads the Megalim consortium managing the project.

The tower should provide 121 megawatts, or two percent of Israel's electricity needs, enough for a city of 110,000 households.

The country of eight million people is seeking to make renewable energy account for 10 percent of its total consumption by 2020.

A field of mirrors covering 300 hectares (740 acres) -- the size of more than 400 football pitches -- will stretch out from its base, directing sunlight toward the Ashalim solar tower ©Jack Guez (AFP)

Solar power offers a clean alternative to fuel- and carbon-fired electricity plants, which contribute to global warming with their heat-trapping CO2 emissions.

"The government agreed to move ahead with this technology -- even though we do not hide the fact that it is more expensive than traditional electricity production -- precisely to achieve lower costs over time," Gartner said at the site.

"The second solar tower will be slightly less expensive, the third much less expensive, et cetera."

He predicted a futuristic landscape of towers overlooking the desert.

Israel could in theory meet all its electricity needs through solar energy by using only four percent of the Negev desert, said Eitan Parnass, head of the Green Energy Association of Israel.

- Field of mirrors -

Israel's offshore gas finds are a major boost toward energy independence, but Parnass said it must continue to diversify to avoid reliance on a single source in the turbulent Middle East.

"We are in a situation where we cannot simply look at the economic aspect," he said. "Israel has no choice but to diversify its energy independence, first for reasons of security."

However, critics have panned the project as too expensive and complex compared to other solutions.

Construction of the Ashalim solar tower, costing an estimated €500 million, is being financed by US firm General Electric, with France's Alstom and Israeli private investment fund Noy also involved ©Jack Guez (AFP)

Yael Cohen, an Israeli lawmaker with the opposition Zionist Union alliance and co-chair of the Green Movement political party, said the project has "requirements so demanding and costs so high" that it cannot be replicated.

Solar power has for years formed a part of life in Israel, where rooftop panels are often used to heat the water tanks of homes.

A solar tower and its field of mirrors, a technology known as concentrated solar thermal, is only profitable as part of a large-scale project, unlike a photovoltaic field, where each panel acts as a small generator.

The Ashalim tower will be equipped with 55,000 projecting mirrors, amounting to a total reflective surface of a million square metres (10.8 million square feet).

Like sunflowers, the mirrors will turn toward the path of the sun.

Engineers have developed reservoirs for the task of storing heat when the sun is not out.

"It's the big plus of solar tower technology... centralization and stockage of energy at nighttime opens the path to massive use of solar electricity in Israel," said Parnass.

Solar towers have already been built in locations such as Morocco, South Africa and California, where the world's tallest at present -- standing at 137 metres -- is located in Ivanpah in the Mojave desert.

"We multiplied the size of the mirrors by three compared to the previous generation," Gartner said.

"Everything is connected by WiFi instead of by cables. The tower and its boiler are also designed to reduce costs. Everything is done to pursue profitability."

Israel's government launched a tender for the Ashalim solar tower project in 2013, as part of a shift towards renewable energy and energy independence ©Jack Guez (AFP)

Originally published by AFP

GUEST BLOG POST: It Pays Better To Improve Inventions Than To Invent — Jeffrey Baumgartner

Image credit/artist: Jeffrey Baumgartner; source: creativejeffrey.com

By Jeffrey Baumgartner

Companies become innovators by inventing exciting, all new products, launching them upon the world and becoming stinking rich as a result of their ideas. That's what innovation is all about, right?

Wrong! Most companies that invent truly new products and services − and try to profit from them − actually go bankrupt and are soon forgotten. It is the companies that copy those inventors' ideas, and fundamentally improve upon those ideas, that tend to become known as innovators − and get stinking rich.

Let's look at a few examples.

Archie and Google

Do you remember Archie? It was the Internet's first search engine. It even predated the web. Archie enabled early Internet users to search on-line archives which at that time were basically file directories accessible by FTP (File Transfer Protocol). The World Wide Web became a reality in 1993 and not long afterwards, Aliweb was launched as a web directory. In 1994, Yahoo was established, not as a search engine, but as a web directory. I still remember submitting new web pages to them during their early days. Excite, probably the first commercial search engine, was launched not long afterwards. Lycos, Altavista and others soon followed.

If you used a search engine in the 1990s, you probably remember that they tended to deliver loads of results, nearly all of which were completely irrelevant to what you were really looking for. To make matters worse, once marketers recognized the potential of search engines, they quickly figured out how to rig the system and, as a result, any search term you entered would lead to an amazing number of completely irrelevant promotions, a surprising number of which were pornographic.

About this time, a couple of students at Stanford University had an idea. What if you treated web search like academic search in which papers that received a lot of citations were assumed to be more important than those that did not receive so many citations? Their university project became Google. It was far from being the first search engine. But it did one thing no other search engine of the time did well: it actually found what you were looking for.

Today, those early search engines are mostly long forgotten and Google has become a huge company founded not upon invention, but upon fundamentally improving an existing product. (If you are interested in early search engine history, this article is worth reading)

Facebook

Likewise, Facebook was not the first friend-based social media space on the web. Even before the web existed, there were a  number on-line bulletin board systems (BBS) that allowed people to post messages, share files (often, truth be known, pirated software and games) and chat. This is how America on Line (AOL) and Compuserve got started. In addition, there were many techies who set up their own BBS for small communities. I explored a few such systems in the early 90s.

Early web based social media included Classmates.com and Friendster. MySpace, launched in 2003, became the biggest social network in the world in 2008 when it surpassed Google as the most visited website in the USA. Indeed, when Facebook first expanded outside of Universities and to the public, MySpace was all the rage and many people questioned the need for yet another social media site. Yet, Facebook was fundamentally better in a few simple ways. Perhaps most importantly, users used their real names. Secondly, because it started as a Harvard University networking tool and expanded slowly to other campuses, it was perceived as a tool for networking with existing friends rather than finding new friends with weird user-names. Thirdly, apps that people could play together on Facebook kept people on Facebook.

Today, of course, MySpace and Friendster are largely forgotten and Facebook rules the social media space in a big way.

I have left LinkedIn out of this example because it focuses on business networking, rather than friendship based networking. Nevertheless, it is also an example of fundamentally improving upon earlier social networks by focusing on business networking. It has also been very successful, if not quite in Facebook's league of global domination successful.

Ifyou are interested in the history of social networking, you may find this interesting. It helped confirm my memory on early social networking.

Tesla

Prototype electric cars first showed up in the 1820s and 1830s and if you hopped into a horseless London cab at the end of the 19th century, it was probably battery powered. Indeed, had history been a bit different, we might all be driving electric cars today and only know internal combustion engine vehicles from museums. But, of course, it did not happen that way. Petrol powered cars eventually became more popular, in spite of being noisier, smellier and harder to start. Their longer range and greater speed made them a better alternative to battery powered cars.

In  the years since then, petrol and diesel engine cars have the norm. Manufacturers have from time to time experimented with battery powered cars and half-heartedly tried to market them. Usually, the cars have been small, lightweight cars with short ranges and few comforts. The belief was that no one would want their main family car to be reliant on battery recharges, but people might be keen on a small battery powered second car for shopping and other local errands. However, the cost of batteries meant these simple runabouts cost more to buy than better equipped petrol and diesel engine cars. So, they never achieved much popularity.

Elon Musk had a different idea. He reckoned that people would be more comfortable paying a premium for a luxury electric car with a long range than they would be paying a premium for an underpowered car with a short range and few comforts. So he set up Tesla to make high-end battery powered cars with lots of cool gadgets. Being in the luxury car price bracket allowed the cars to have lots of expensive batteries in them and that enabled the cars to drive further between recharges. Moreover, Tesla set up recharging stations to make things even easier for their customers. However, the electric running gear of Tesla cars is no substantial innovation over other recent electric cars.

Indeed, had Mercedes Benz or Lexus had the same idea, they probably could have built better luxury electric cars using a lot of existing parts. But, they did not have the idea. Now they are scrambling to catch up.

So, Mr Musk did not invent the electric car. But he came up with a fundamental conceptual improvement over previous electric cars and that has led to tremendous success for Tesla and Mr Musk.

The Lessons

1. Do not invent − improve inventions

The first lesson to learn here is that inventing great new products often does not lead to wealth. Indeed, it tends to lead to bankruptcy and being forgotten. Rather, it is the companies that fundamentally improve upon existing products that tend to be most successful.

2. Innovate outside of your field of expertise

Moreover, these fundamental improvers are almost always new to the field in which they launch their products. They are either start-ups, as in the examples we've discussed, or they are established companies moving into new territory. Take, for example, Apple. Their iPods were their first foray into the field of MP3 players, an already well established field. However, their iPods were more elegant, more stylish and easier to use than any existing product. 

Likewise, Google's android operating system has become the default operating system of nearly every smartphone that is not made by Apple. Yet, prior to the launch of android, Google had not been in the smart phone business.

This means that if your company is well established in a particular field, it is unlikely to come up with a fundamental improvement innovation in that field. It would be better to explore related fields were your corporate expertise is applicable. If you've been manufacturing bed sheets for years, you are unlikely to come up with an idea to fundamentally improve bed sheets. You know your product too well. You would do better to try and come up with a fundamental improvement on pyjamas or bedframes. There you have relevant technical knowledge together with sufficient naivety to come up with something fundamentally new.

3. If you must invent, give your invention away

If you are an inventor who has come up with a radically new idea, I suggest you give it away rather than try to profit from it. Linus Torvalds gave away his Linux operating system and is considered something of a hero and founding father of the open source community. He may not be stinking rich, but earns a good income and is hugely respected. Had he tried to sell his product, I suspect Microsoft or Oracle or some other company would have eaten him for lunch.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the protocols behind the world wide web and also made them publicly available as standards. He's famous, widely respected and earns far more than I do giving speeches. Had he tried to patent and sell his idea, well, the world would probably be a different place now. He'd probably be bankrupt and some big IT company would own the network.

Originally published in creativejeffrey.com