Amount matched by UKaid - $30000

Have you ever heard of the energy-poverty trap? Most of us take power for granted, but without affordable energy, it’s actually quite difficult to make a decent income (no lights or machinery), and without enough income, it’s quite difficult to afford energy.

For the vast majority of the 1.2 billion people living off-grid, solar power is the cheapest form of power. Per unit of electricity, it’s about 50 times cheaper than using dangerous Kerosene, or almost 10 times cheaper than charging up old car batteries.

But the sad thing is, for people who make as little as $1,000 a year, it’s just not realistic for everyone to be able to afford the initial down payment for a solar panel.

To add to the issue, for the people who do manage to save up for solar, when their battery gets full, the power that’s coming for free from the sun, gets wasted. On average, about 30% of the energy generated from an off-grid solar home system gets wasted and nobody gets to use it at all.

Being IoT engineers from Australia who were interested in this space, we came to Cambodia to see if there was anything we could do to help reduce the energy poverty trap here. What we observed were houses literally meters apart from each other, with some wasting solar power that they couldn’t store, and others forced to cook and light with dangerous kerosene next door because they couldn’t afford a solar home system.

The opportunity for implementing a simple IoT enabled power sharing system between households was pretty obvious. There’s power that’s being wasted, near houses who are paying up to 50 times the generated cost of the wasted power. So we’ve spent the better part of the last 3 months developing a prototype to prove our concept.

We’re calling it the Okra and why we’re so passionate about it is because it’s a win-win; enabling families with a solar home system to generate a second income from sharing excess power, while providing people who didn’t have the means to buy a solar home system, access to affordable power.

All expenditures will commence after 10th of January 2017.

*For detailed information regarding electronics, hardware & software stack used, please contact Okra Solar directly at [email protected]

Validate that excess power is available

According to our calculations, we estimate 30% of the power that is generated from off-grid solar home systems will, on average, be excess. But this number is dependant the season, usage patterns, the sizing of the initial system by distributors and more. Our algorithms will need to be smart to ensure households who are depending on solar sharing as their primary source of power are not without power for their most essential services (such as lighting) - otherwise depending on solar power sharing might put them in a worse position than they were before. Our first deployment in Cambodia will be remote monitoring systems in a number of off-grid houses. The data obtained regarding excess power, time of excess power, and relationship of excess power between close-by households will be used to develop smarter, and more effective algorithms for solar power sharing. For example, with the ability to better forecast the available power, we will be able to throttle power consumption at houses if we know that they won't have much availble power coming through in the near future. 

Test that swarm grids can be managed safely

Transferring power across a network of interconnected households and batteries may lead to dangerous over charge/discharge of batteries and also opens the door for surge currents to damage parts of the infrastructure or connected appliances if not managed appropriately. We are working closely with academics from University of Technology Sydney and University of Sydney, Australia to design a system that is safe, reliable, and cost effective for the end users in Cambodia. 

Integrate solar power sharing seamlessly with existing customs

Existing customs and traditions in the communities solar power sharing is integrated in must be respected if solar power sharing is to work effectively. For example, in Cambodia, diesel power generators will be adversely impacted with the introduction of solar power schemes (as they will suffer from revenue loss). This puts the trial at risk of being sabotaged. We plan on working closely with the diesel power generators and bringing them on board as technicians for the solar power sharing schemes - so the community can continue benefiting from their technical expertise, while they generate revenue from managing the solar power schemes - rather than being alienated by them. We will continue making an effort to learn as much as possible about ways to integrate seemlessly with the customs and norms in the communities we will work in.