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How Pre-Paid Energy Services Aid In Rural Electrification
First time accepted submitter superfast-scooter writes "I wanted to let the community know of a research project I've been fortunate to be part of — it's a rural electrification project called SharedSolar at the Modi Research Group at Columbia University. The project has 17 pilot sites in sub-Saharan Africa to-date, providing prepaid energy services to over 3000 people who did not have access to electricity — a fraction of the over 1.3 Billion worldwide. The lab has been developing custom software applications to integrate off-the-shelf hardware components, and also provide the operational and management mechanisms needed. Communications with the sites are over the mobile networks. Consumers can recharge their accounts using either cellphones, or visit a designated local vendor who can do it at the site using an Android app. Software residing locally makes each site autonomous, and the online platform allows for remote visibility, localized consumer interactions and integration with payment solutions. And we're planning on deploying soon in Haiti and Kenya."
Please don't give U.S. utility companies any ideas. The last thing I need is to have to pay bills in advance.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Hope it doesn't cause any trouble.
I just spent two weeks in Uganda, at a rural hospital in Kisiizi - there is no link to the national grid, so they generate their own electricity off of a waterfall that they have (really impressive).
With the excess that they generate, they sell to surrounding villages - the way that they get paid is that each building they link to the Kisiizi grid they also install what is basically a pay-as-you-use black box, as simple as you like. The locals buy pre-paid vouchers from authorised sellers, and they text the code to a number (basically everyone in Uganda, poor or not, has a mobile phone - landlines are extremely hard to find) and their box gets credited with the value.
It has really helped the villages surrounding Kisiizi, as while Uganda has a rural electrification project (again using pre-payment), its very very slow moving (I visited dozens of villages that were no more than 30 minutes off of major highways, and none of them have mains electricity). Fraud and theft of electricity has found to be very small, in general those in the villages are honest and pay their dues.
Reading the article I get the impression the "payment" is really just a way of rationing the power between several consumers wired through meters to the solar panel (they're on a "micro-grid" within 50 meters of the panel). I assume the price they pay is also very low, and with so little power available to share there's plenty of incentive to self-police.
First, do no harm.
Why, for the love of God, would you bring electricity to a society that doesn't have it?
What if the battery of their cell phone is out of juice?
In Tanzania, the electricity supplier, Tanesco, works in a similar way. Every house/appartment has a box/meter installed where the amount of kWh left is displayed. To recharge it, one needs to pay at distribution points by giving the number of the meter and the amount of money necessary. A code is generated, that works only for the meter it was meant for, which is typed into the meter. The entire country's electricity runs this way.
The thing that struck me immediately while reading the summary is: If you don't have electricity, how do you have a cell phone?
Please stop pluralizing words with an apostrophe. That is not what it is there for.
True, Virgin Mobile USA is 20 cents per minute if you're on the cheapest $7/mo payLo plan. Such a plan is fine for people like me who use a cell phone for arranging rides, much as one might have used a pay phone before they disappeared. People in this use profile delay calls other than arranging a ride until they get to a land line with unlimited local minutes. They may use fewer than 400 minutes per year. But if you use your phone more than that, such as if you use it to replace a land line, you can sign up for a prepay-per-month plan that's a lot cheaper per minute: $35 for 500 minutes of voice and more text and data than you know what to do with (tethering not available).
Once their economy is kick started through these programs more jobs can be outsourced from the US.
The Balassa-Samuelson model predicts that an economy focused on goods and services consumed locally will have an undervalued currency. But whenever "jobs [are] outsourced from the US" or from another developed country, some country is exporting services. As an economy begins exporting goods and services, its currency will become stronger as makers of local goods and services raise their wages to keep workers from flocking to export sectors. Thus the developed countries help the developing countries industrialize.
I'm the submitter and one of the SWE's on the project. Prepayment meters are not new, and are quite commonly available and in use. Distributing scratch cards for purchase and validation are also not a novelty, and as noted in the summary this is an option we provide. What seems to be uncommon is the use of software management systems at the sites themselves - a high-level one at that, and not logic embedded in hardware like the meters. Because of this, we're able to control several networked devices at the sites, and add on service features as we learn.
Using intermittent renewables like we do (solar), we need to know how much was generated and ensure everyone is guaranteed a fair share. The software provides us that platform. We haven't implemented demand-response [yet] that will help with better management (for eg: cloudy-day scenarios), but do ration based on how much load is plugged in and how much is being consumed by each consumer. This helps to make sure that just a few heavy-duty consumers do not hog all the resources and exhaust the supply all by themselves.
Also, because this is all in software, it doesn't matter what the source is as long as we use devices that we can network and get readings from. In this sense, the generation could be from solar, wind, hydro, or even the old diesel gensets. We went with solar, hence SharedSolar, but it's really SharedSupply.
Another thing to note is that we can adapt and add more features to a service by changes in the software, without the need to make changes in the hardware configurations themselves. We can replicate the same model, or try new ones out, in different settings using different components as we see fit. For instance, we're evaluating different metering devices now but since everything about the service is in the distributed software platform, we only need to get devices that do AMR/AMI, without the need for even basic logic like prepayment. I wrote about where the software intelligence should sit depending on the quality of IP-based communications channels in a blog post here - http://sharedsolar.org/?page_id=13 .
Also, just by having the software at the site, it allows us the possibility of tuning the service remotely, along with short turn-arounds between malfunctions and fix.
The points others made about reduction in line theft etc are spot-on. One commenter asked if the consumers pay for the cellular interactions - they don't. This is actually a good case for having developed the local vendor solution the consumers seem to prefer - the entrepreneur who used to sell them kerosene is equipped with an Android device and now helps sell prepaid electricity. This was only possible because of the web services we could build on the local software platform and not because of anything inherent in the hardware/meters.
Also, mobile service providers are also slowly getting interested in this space, as they have been with banking, health etc and they are our partners where we deploy. There are also interesting projects where the excess power generated at the base stations are distributed to the nearby populace.
Thanks.
Scalable, sustainable community creation starting from family farm plots all the way up to a village bank, training new leaders and then replicating to the next community. Then NURU leaves ... you should check them out. Your interests overlap.