The Thrilling Potential for Off-Grid Solar Energy | Amar Inamdar | TED

267,458 views ・ 2018-02-19

TED


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00:12
There's something really incredible happening.
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So there's over a billion people
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who have no access to energy whatsoever across the world,
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620 million of them here in Africa.
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It costs about 1,500 dollars to connect each household up to the grid.
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If you are going to wait for it, it takes about nine years, on average,
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and that feels like a lifetime when you're trying to make that happen.
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That's kind of unbelievable,
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and it's also unacceptable.
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So let's do something about it.
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The lightbulb comes from this idea that you have an energy system
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that's made up of the ideas of Tesla
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and the ideas of Thomas Edison.
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There was an evolution that said it's not just about the lightbulb,
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it's about the whole system,
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the whole energy system that goes with that lightbulb,
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and what happened in that gilded age
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was the creation of an industrial system
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that every country around the world has now started to emulate.
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So to get to the appliances, you need to have power stations.
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From power stations, you need to have infrastructure,
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and that infrastructure takes you to the point of having electricity,
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and you get to the lightbulbs and the appliances
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that we all take for granted.
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But the amazing thing, in a way, is that there's a revolution happening
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in the villages and towns all around us here in East Africa.
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And the revolution is an echo of the cell phone revolution.
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It's wireless,
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and that revolution is about solar and it's about distributed solar.
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Photons are wireless,
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they fall on every rooftop,
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and they generate enough power to be sufficient for every household need.
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So that's an incredible thing.
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There's also a problem with it.
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Up until now, the technology hasn't been there to make it happen,
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and the mindset has been that we have to have the grid
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to provide industrial growth
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and let countries develop and create jobs and industrialize.
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So we've gotten ourselves to the point
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where actually the costs of building these grids
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and following that pattern of development
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are really unsustainable.
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If you add up the deficits that all of the utilities run in Africa,
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sub-Saharan Africa,
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you get to a number of 21 billion dollars every year
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to maintain that system and keep it going.
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So an extraordinary amount of resources
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that's been put in to creating a system
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that ultimately we will have to wait a very long time for,
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and when it comes,
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it often doesn't come with sufficient robustness
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to allow us to go down that path to development.
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So what a shame.
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But here's what's happening,
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and here's the opportunity that I think we should all get excited about.
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So there's a group of companies
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that have been chipping away at this problem over the last 10 years,
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and this group of companies
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have recognized the reality that there's a great big nuclear reactor
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up there in the sky,
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and that Africa is more endowed with that solar power
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that comes from the sky, the sun,
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than almost any other continent.
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So the opportunity has come to convert some of that solar power,
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wireless power, into energy at the household level.
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And three things have happened at the same time.
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First, the costs of solar productivity have come down.
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So putting a panel on your roof and generating power from it,
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that cost has absolutely collapsed over the last 30 years,
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and it's gone down by 95 percent.
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Second, the appliance network.
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So the group of appliances that we've all gotten used to,
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we all want and we all need, we all see as part of our everyday lives
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that give us health and security,
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those appliances have come down in cost.
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So if you take the LED lightbulb, for example, a very simple thing,
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they're now 85 percent less than they were five years ago,
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and their efficiency, when you compare them to an incandescent bulb,
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like the lightbulb I showed in the previous slide,
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is incredible.
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They give you 10 times the amount of light,
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and they last 30 times as long.
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And then the last thing that's happened is of course the cell phone revolution,
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so we're piggybacking off the cell phone revolution,
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and we can now make decentralized customers make small payments
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for bits of equipment and appliances
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where actually they're now affordable.
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We can pay them off over a daily or a weekly schedule.
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So this is an incredible change in the economy that's happening,
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and it's really opened up something very, very innovative.
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So I'm going to introduce you to a lady I met with last week.
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Her name's Susan.
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It may not look like it,
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but Susan is a representative of a $27 billion market.
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27 billion dollars is what people like Susan spend every year
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on cell phone charging,
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flashlight batteries and kerosene to light their homes.
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So Susan is a proud owner of a small solar system.
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It's a kit rather than a planetary thing,
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so a small solar system,
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and her small solar system allows her to have a couple of lightbulbs,
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and she's made this transition, this jump, from kerosene into light.
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She has four or five lights and a radio.
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It's fantastic, and she talks about it.
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She talks about her kids doing homework at night because she has light.
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I'm not sure what the kids feel about that.
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She talks about the fact that she can go out at 4am and look after the cows,
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and she's not so worried,
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but also, with a little twinkle in her eye,
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she talks about how light turns her house into a home at night.
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She's not scared of her own house at night,
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because it has light in it, and I thought that was amazing.
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So Susan does something that many customers of these companies
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that I talked about do,
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and she forces us to innovate.
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She challenges companies, saying, "I've got the radio and the lights.
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You know what? I'd like a TV.
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I'd like to entertain, educate me and my kids.
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And then I would like to have some hair clippers for my kids,
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you know, to cut my kids' hair, and I'd love to have a fridge.
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And she's coined something
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that the energy world is really hungry to do.
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The idea that she's coined is the energy ladder.
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It starts, again, with a lightbulb. Right?
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And the lightbulb is an idea that we can get our kids to do homework,
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and very cheap, about five dollars,
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and we can get it distributed.
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But then let's go up from there.
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This is the kit that Susan has:
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four lightbulbs, radio, maybe a little flashlight,
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a little solar panel on the roof.
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And then let's go up again.
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We can get maybe at about 500 dollars,
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the previous kit was maybe $150,
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again, paid for over time,
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two years to pay it all off,
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you can get the TV,
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so the lightbulbs and the TV.
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And you start to ask yourself, "So where is this headed?"
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Is this headed here,
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where we can have distributed systems
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with the right infrastructure to provide power
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for our hospitals and our schools?
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And really how far can this go?
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And this is the mindset shift that I think is really exciting.
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How far can we go?
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Could it get up to here?
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You know, this is the conceptual design for one of the world's biggest factories,
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designed to be fully solar-powered and fully off grid.
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Maybe we can get that.
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So there's a generation of these companies
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that are out there doing this work and creating thousands of jobs,
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creating, selling, tens of thousands of these solar systems,
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so bringing tens of thousands of families into light,
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and tackling that big $1 billion problem that I talked about at the beginning,
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and really innovating.
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And what they're doing is, they're not only energy companies,
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they're also credit finance companies,
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so they're bringing people into an economy.
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They're retail companies,
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so they're taking products out to people in the connecting markets.
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And they're appliance companies,
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so they're developing extraordinary products
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that are very efficient and very cheap.
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So an extraordinary thing is happening out there
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that's worth recognizing.
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And where does it take us?
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From a governmental perspective, from a social perspective,
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it takes us out to two really big goals.
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We aspire towards energy access for everybody,
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and we aspire towards a fully-functioning low-carbon economy.
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And we're getting to the point where we're seeing
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the fully-functioning low-carbon economy
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is not just about getting people onto the grid,
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it's about getting people onto electricity
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and doing it in a way that's really dignified.
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So I want us all to picture it for a moment,
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really picture what this could mean:
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[New energy ecosystem]
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an energy system that's not just about subsistence power,
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getting the family off the kerosene,
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but it's actually the full suite of appliances and tools
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and productivity that we've all gotten used to,
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so actually energy at a scale that can drive industrial development.
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And it's the ability to have powerful tools.
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It's the ability to be productive in the households, as a farmer,
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or as a carpenter or as a tailor
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and get your businesses to work and bring you into the economy.
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And I was working again a couple of days ago with a farmer
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just outside of Nairobi, small field,
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and he has an irrigation pump that's run off solar,
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and he was bragging about how much of a difference it made
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to his productivity.
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When we were listening to him, we were asking ourselves,
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at what point will it be
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that actually, you will be charging an electric scooter off your rooftop
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and taking your crops to market
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with mobility that you've charged yourself, using your own power?
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And that's an extraordinary thing that's happening,
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and if you listen to Susan and Francis,
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you get to this point where you say,
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"These guys have this extraordinary sense of dignity
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about the way they're achieving their power,
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the sense of ownership and the sense of pride,
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and I'm going to flip into a little tiny video clip,
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which is from a distributor of one of these companies that I'm talking about.
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And he puts it better than anyone I've ever heard it.
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So just listen to this.
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Martin: So if it does happen that we get to a point
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where every home has their own independent supply of energy,
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that will give us the democracy of energy.
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That's it.
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And everybody has that choice,
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and everybody knows when they want to switch it on or off,
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whether they want to sell access or whether they want to store it.
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That freedom getting back into the hands of the consumer,
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that would be the most exciting thing.
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Amar Inamdar: Brilliant, right? That was Martin,
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and he has a really wonderful turn of phrase,
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and what a sense of vision that he captures.
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So picture that for a moment:
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every household a proud producer as well as consumer of energy ...
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the ability to generate power, to share power, to sell power,
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all coming from your own generating asset sitting on your own property.
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Maybe even think about crowdsourcing with your neighbors
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the grid from the ground up,
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rather than waiting for the government to bring it from the top down.
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So in Africa, we have this extraordinary opportunity right now,
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an extraordinary opportunity,
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to change the world and create an energy system
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that everybody will be jealous of,
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and everybody will look to us as the innovators of.
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And that's the democracy of energy.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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Chris Anderson: Quick question.
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So it's a really exciting vision.
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Help us understand, what are the key roadblocks right now?
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Like, what could make this go faster?
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AI: So the first one, I think, is really the intermittency of solar power.
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So the problem is that the sun only shines for 12 hours a day,
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so you've got darkness for 12 hours a day,
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and we need to have storage solutions
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that are better to help us take us down that path.
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So storage is really one.
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CA: And those prices are coming down.
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AI: And those prices are coming down very quickly.
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Second, the appliance set.
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So it needs to get more efficient,
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and it needs to get more diverse.
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We need to do more of the things
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we in Africa want to do with the appliance set.
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CA: DC appliances.
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AI: DC appliances,
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and I think there's a real opportunity there, Chris.
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I think the opportunity
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is that we could shift some of these 21 billion dollars of subsidies
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that governments are spending on the current electricity system
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and we could promote R&D here in Africa
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to create some of these products,
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to be some of these entrepreneurs, and make this happen.
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So create this new system here.
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CA: And some of the companies themselves,
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I mean, there's plenty of demand there.
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What's holding them back from supplying that demand?
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I mean, some of them talk about,
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they would like to sell 10x what they can currently sell.
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AI: Exactly. So for many of these capitals,
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it's that markets don't price consumer risk very well,
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and particularly in markets like ours,
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in emerging markets and here in Africa.
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So there's not enough working capital coming into this space
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because the big financiers look at this space and say,
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"I don't know how to price that risk, so I'm going to stay away from it."
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And that's holding a lot of these companies back.
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CA: Well, it's incredibly exciting to picture what could happen here.
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In my mind, this might be the biggest leapfrog of them all.
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And thank you for all you're doing and for sharing that vision
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so powerfully.
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