Open Energy Access

EnAccess

All things Open Source in Energy Access. In an effort to make safe, affordable, and clean energy available for every person on the planet, we're going to need to remove some of the most common barriers. By open sourcing software, hardware, and knowledge, we can save very valuable time and money for the companies that are building mini grids in rural villages, setting up solar home systems on remote islands, building the technology to make appliances PAYGO compatible. read less
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Episódios

How to bring WiFi connectivity to very remote areas: Interview with Oscar Aitchison from Okra Solar
08-07-2022
How to bring WiFi connectivity to very remote areas: Interview with Oscar Aitchison from Okra Solar
Picture a remote island, populated by many small and medium-sized communities. The local economy largely runs on a fishing industry. Children go to school, markets sell food & goods, but two important things are missing: reliable energy access and connectivity. There's no real cell signal in the village of Maybuuho, Philippines. This means that not only do people lack the ability to communicate outside their village, renewable energy solutions like solar-powered mini-grids or Solar Home Systems aren't very easy to use. Without any sort of connectivity, modern off-grid energy companies that are operating today end up de-prioritising "zero connectivity" locations, which exist all around the world. Okra is a technology company that manufactures everything needed to set up what they call a "mesh grid" as a kit, and then sell those kits to  Energy Access companies (like SHS or Mini-Grid companies) around the world. Their latest innovation is called the Cicada WiFi, an open source communications module, that brings WiFi connectivity to remote areas using VSAT technology.Tamara Mahoney from EnAccess and Oscar Aitchison from Okra talk about Cicadas - not the insects, but the chip - today on Open Energy Access. They discuss the impact this technology had not only for the company that participated in their pilot, but also potential impact for the village of Maybuuho, who could be offered Internet As A Service for the first time.  More information: https://enaccess.org/materials/okra-cicada/
The D-REC Initiative from Positive Capital Partners and South Pole
30-08-2021
The D-REC Initiative from Positive Capital Partners and South Pole
Today, I'm talking with Paul Needham and Ricky Buch from Positive Capital Partners. EnAccess is one of the funders of a project they are working on, together with South Pole, called the D-REC Initiative. The D-REC, or Distributed Renewable Energy Certificate is being created to solve a problem that will have a direct benefit for Energy Access project developers and for corporates who want the biggest return on their investment in renewable energy in terms of climate impact. In a place like California, a homeowner who installs solar panels on their house can actually sell the renewable energy that those panels create, creating a way to make money. There is no equivalent to this for DRE developers working in off grid locations, which basically means the energy access industry hasn’t yet been able to tap into the already-existing demand for renewable energy attributes. And on the other side, corporates haven’t had the chance to make the kind of climate impact that they could be making, if they were to have a certifiable way of investing into distributed renewable energy.  This is where we need the D-REC:  an open source, internationally accepted market instrument which can validate, and put a real monetary value on the environmental benefit provided by DRE systems. In this conversation, Paul and Ricky talk about how they got this Initiative off the ground and why Open Source is so important for its' success. Links: enaccess.org/drecsd-recs.energyD-RECs on GitHubEnergy Web Foundation OriginEnAccess blog postEnAccess was the first to step in with funding for this project from, and we are really happy to currently be joined by the Shell Foundation, Good Energies Foundation, Signify Foundation, GIZ-DeveloPPP, the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), UNDP, the IFC, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).
Solving the connectivity problem with Cicada - an Open Source IoT Communications Module by Okra Solar
01-10-2019
Solving the connectivity problem with Cicada - an Open Source IoT Communications Module by Okra Solar
Today we’re going to talk about a really cool open source hardware solution with Damian Veling, the CTO of Okra Solar - this episode is definitely going to be more interesting for the engineers and developers out there, though anyone working in the IoT space will find the conversation interesting. Okra is an Australian technology startup based in Cambodia. They work with local utilities to transform offgrid communities into energy abundant microgrid economies. One of the big reasons why millions of households all over the world still don’t have energy access infrastructure is because it’s physically hard to reach a lot of these places, which is why Okra relies on remotely monitoring the communities they service. But to be able to work like this means there needs to be some sort of data or wifi connectivity in the village - but connectivity is also a real challenge in some of the more remote areas of the world.How to solve this very common and very real issue of connectivity in hard to reach areas? That’s what we’re going to talk about on today's show. Okra’s solution is called Cicada, an open source IoT Communications Module for Energy Access. Damian solved a really big problem that a lot of other energy access companies will be able to relate to - if you have been struggling with a solution for connectivity in your own IoT space, you’re going to want to listen closely: Cicada can be the solution that reduces your time to market, which can allow you to get back to work on the real problem you are solving.EnAccess is proud to have all the open source materials published online. So if you’re ready to dig into the code and the documentation, or read the story behind the project, head over to https://enaccess.org/projects/- you’ll find everything you need there. If you have any questions, comments, or tweaks for the code, we want to hear from you! You can visit https://www.okrasolar.com/ to send a message directly to the developers.If you have an idea for a project that could be beneficial to the broader energy access sector, head to https://enaccess.org/ and submit your application today.