VUTSELA means "keep burning" in Siswati.
Energy access in Eswatini is limited and very dependent on neighbouring countries with 80% of electricity being imported from South Africa and Mozambique. Liquefied petroleum gas availability is declining sharply with production facilities in South Africa closing down. The bulk of the population (78%) are based in rural areas, contributing to the crisis of ensuring viable and sustainable supply of energy to households. Decentralised energy supply solutions such as solar PV and biogas are suitable solutions to this problem. Biogas may be particularly well suited for adoption in Eswatini as 71% of the land is agricultural and feedstock for digestion is readily available. Biogas generated sustainably from waste could satisfy household or light-industrial heating requirements, which form the majority of energy needs.
Farms would be an appropriate route to market entry as digestion provides the added benefit of waste disposal and fertilser production in addition to energy savings from biogas production. As 37% of the economically active population of Eswatini is employed in agriculture, targeting farms aids the economic survival of a backbone of employment in the country. Moreover, it effectively exposes a large proportion of the population to a new technology (biogas generation through anaerobic digestion) which aids in education and wider scale later adoption.
This project aims to roll out 100 digesters (plus an initial 15 prototypes) to low income farms in Eswatini and the bordering regions of South Africa. Eswatini is targeted due to the reasons stated, and South Africa is seen as a potential market expansion in neighbouring regions with a similar context. This project period will be used to gain valuable market feedback through community engagement and the established methods of Smart Villages Research Group to understand and define the real needs of the local farms and communities and use this information for design revisions before future commercial rollout and continued operation.
The project will be executed with a local tertiary training centre, STREEC, aimed at equipping Eswatini youth with technical skills in renewable energy and entrepreneurship. Small commercial farms will be chosen for initial sites within a 100km radius of the training centre for ease of monitoring, training, and engagement hubs for wider groups of low income farmers to introduce the technology and understand the specific needs and value to the community. Innovation will be largely focused on technology adoption and developing a viable and sustainable business model.
Our project aims to address challenges faced by larger solar productive-use power and minigrid solutions in achieving commercial sustainability, affordability, and ease of installation for end-users. Based on our experience implementing community minigrids and powering boreholes and milling machines in Africa, acquiring the necessary infrastructure components, specifically mounting systems for solar panels, proves to be the most difficult aspect due to specialised skills required for welding and fabrication, and complex procurement and installation in remote rural areas.
The cost of mounting hardware for panels constitutes 40-50% of the total panel cost, and transportation and installation expenses amplify this burden. Surprisingly, there is limited competition in the supply of mounting systems compared to readily available equipment.
Our solution involves developing and testing a simple, locally-appropriate approach: floating panels above specially-dug ponds. This cost-effective solution, suitable for small rural minigrids, fills the gap left by expensive and complex floating mounting solutions designed for marine environments.
Implementing this solution costs only 5-10% of traditional metal racking, reducing the overall system cost by 10-20%. Shaded water surfaces in ponds maintain temperatures between 20-25 degrees Celsius, increasing panel efficiency by 6-10% according to Suntech specifications.
The integration of aquaculture in Tanzanian communities through our solution presents significant economic benefits for local farmers. By leveraging the shaded pool area surrounding the floating solar panels, farmers can engage in fish farming activities, creating an additional source of income and livelihood. The revenue generated from aquaculture provides farmers with a diversified income stream, enhancing their financial resilience and contributing to the overall economic development of the community. Additionally, the availability of fish locally offers food security and reduces reliance on external sources, further supporting the sustainable growth of Tanzanian farmers.
We anticipate that this cost-effective solution will drive greater adoption of clean energy systems in Tanzanian communities and beyond.
Kampala, Uganda has the 17th worst air pollution in the world, with an abundance of motorcycles contributing with unregulated emissions. 75% of Ugandans are rural farmers, living off of subsistence farming with energy access rates below 10%. Meanwhile, the two-wheeled EV (2WEV) market is taking off in the region, poised to help reduce air pollution but introducing a looming e-waste problem caused when their lithium-ion batteries reach the end of their service life.
Taken separately, these are problems. But together they represent an opportunity to turn e-waste into e-resources, increase energy access and agricultural productivity, and boost the uptake of clean energy solutions. To this end, Soleil Power and STI4D are implementing a project to build high-quality 2WEV batteries designed for efficient repurposing into affordable and scalable 2nd-life products for energy access customers. We want to get ahead of the curve by enabling a circular battery value chain right from the start.
Li-Ion batteries have a long total life-span but they are removed from EV service once they are depleted to 80% of their original capacity. Thereafter, whilst they are no longer optimal for EV use, they still have very high potential value in stationary applications such as mini-grids and institutional ESS. To capture this value, STI4D and Soleil will also design affordable 2nd-life products that can be deployed off-grid or as backup-power.
Soleil will build on existing partnerships to test these innovative products. E-mobility company Zembo, building 2WEVs and battery swapping/charging infrastructure, sees high value in procuring their batteries domestically as well as having a partner to offtake them after they have completed their service. E-Ag partner Regenerators, who are working to increase smallholder productivity through the introduction of an electric tractor will also pilot the EV battery.
Soleil's experience shows that much of the cost associated with the repurposing of EV battery products depends on the complexity of disassembly, testing and rebuilding used battery-modules. The new designs will streamline and accelerate this process to reduce e-waste and facilitate circularity whilst increasing access to clean and affordable energy. A better understanding of the battery circular economy in East Africa is critical to finding optimal ways to incentivize commercial investment, so STI4D and Soleil will also use the project as a case study on which to conduct a value-chain analysis, developing and collecting data on sustainable business models including for combining energy access systems with battery-charging as anchor loads.
Milk is traditionally a woman's asset in the Maasai culture of Northern Tanzania. But traditionally, other than for immediate consumption, milk was not valuable, since it would go off very quickly in the intense heat of the day. Seeking to change the fortune of women in the community, STI4D's Tanzanian partner organisation, community NGO OMASI, started local offgrid dairy businesses throughout the Maasai region some 15 years ago.
The results were remarkable. From a position of having relatively little family 'bargaining power', women who sold their milk to the dairy were suddenly empowered and were appreciated in their families. They were able to sell their milk and buy family essentials in nearby shops, rather than needing to ask their husbands or fathers for the money to do so. They were able to invest some of the funds in school fees for their children. And suddenly the men in the community were in the position of asking their wives for money, rather than the other way round.
In order to operate, the dairies are critically dependent on reliable power. The twin chiller units in the dairy consumer 10kW each, and the heaters for cheese and yoghurt making consume up to 50kW when operating at high volumes. Each dairy was therefore powered by a 63kW diesel generator.
Cost and reliability of power are now the biggest issues keeping them from re-opening. The dairies need reliable power since so much capital is tied up in maturing product like cheese, or stored product like yoghurt, which will quickly spoil if refrigeration fails. The grid supply is notoriously unreliable throughout the region, so even the few dairies that are connected, cannot rely on continuity of connection. Restarting operations is therefore a risk.
Clean energy, eg in minigrids, is known to be more reliable as a power source, but it is very hard to power a load as large and as variable as a dairy from a minigrid. Peak demand is high, but overall load factor would vary so much as to make traditional minigrid technology uneconomical. Together, STI4D and OMASI intend to develop new technology to more cost-effectively provide clean and reliable power to the dairies, and allow them to begin operations again in a long-term sustainable model. The same technology approach will also be appropriate for many other high-power productive use anchor loads in communities, and could be used to cost-effectively complement local minigrids.
This project will gather all the necessary information to assess the feasibility of mechanical harvesting of hazelnuts in the UK. The primary objective being to enable harvesting in a more climatically resilient ecosystem, such as harvesting with significant grass or stubble cover. This would permit hazelnuts to be produced in a commercially viable agroforestry system alongside other productive crops. Giving farmers a more diversified income stream without requiring excessive chemical inputs.
By visiting European leaders in hazelnut production we aim to capture detailed information on current commercial nut farm practice, how existing machinery performs and how wholesalers are supplying current demand.
With this knowledge gathered several tests will be completed in the UK creating a wide range of representative conditions for a proof of concept machine to be assessed.
Half the world's population cannot obtain essential health services (WHO, 2019), and to access even basic healthcare in remote communities of sub-Saharan Africa requires a walk of hours, even days (The Lancet, 2020). Earlier this year, STI4D was able to innovate and test technology to allow communities to hold remote consultations with their medical advisors using simple diagnostic technology and video calling in Tanzania. Feedback from patients and medical professionals was extremely positive in terms of both health, time and financial impacts.
We now want to build international research and innovation partnerships and networks in additional countries to demonstrate the wider viability, acceptance and impact of this solution, as well as to be able to prepare for tailoring and testing the approach in markets other than Tanzania. This will not only give us an improved product/service, but also allow us to commercialise and scale our tele-health system more rapidly and effectively.
In this project, our work will focus on Uganda (a neighbouring country in East Africa which shares many cultural and infrastructural similarities to Tanzania, and will allow us to demonstrate how easily the system can be adapted to similar markets) and in Nepal (a country in Asia which - while it shares many of the challenges of community remoteness - has a significant diversity to East Africa in many other aspects, and will therefore allow us to see how generally applicable our system can be). We will aim to build future research and innovation partnerships and networks with local stakeholders and potential partners, and carry out community engagement and surveys with potential end users, to inform and enable a subsequent process of in-country collaborative R&D and system testing.
This will give us the necessary partnerships, outcomes and data to be able to more successfully and rapidly commercialise and scale our innovative approach to increase rural access to healthcare in the developing world.
At a national electrification rate of 41%, Lesotho lags behind its Southern African peers in both electrifications by grid extension and off grid solutions. This is especially true in the rural villages where 60% of the population lives yet less than 10% are electrified. This is despite the fact that there is need for modern energy services that could accelerate development and create business opportunities. Grid extension is too expensive for rural electrification because of difficult mountainous terrain, and the sparse nature of the population. Mini-grids are a possible solution to this challenge. They have been widely adopted in Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia.
Unlike its African neighbours, Lesotho has not used minigrids to date. This project aims to adapt minigrid technology to Lesotho's unique geography and climate, and demonstrate that they can be a superior sustainable solution for rural energy access. We will adapt the successful minigrid model that project partner GramOorja has applied in over 60 remote rural communities in India to create an innovative technology and business model for Lesotho, combining a minigrid with a set of tailored productivity-enhancing technologies and services (eg water pumping, grain milling, entrepreneurship). Adapting this to Lesotho's requirements will see us engaging with local communities to design and test tailored technology and business models that deliver energy access whilst increasing rural productivity and economic growth in those communities.
Thus our outputs include a rigorous assessment of needs and priorities from minigrid technology in Lesotho, a set of complementary technology models adapted to Lesotho's needs and conditions, a set of business models similarly adapted to Lesotho national needs and behaviour, a validation of that technology and business model as a commercially sustainable and high impact solution for rural electrification, and a innovative finance model for scaling up the minigrid models for widespread adoption in Lesotho.
The project is on-track despite the issues caused by the global COVID pandemic, but we are requesting a small amount of supplementary funding in this application to allow us to acquire smart-metering technology, which will not only allow us to monitor the systems remotely to collect the data necessary for future successful rollout of these solutions (important given the COVID-related timing/budget impacts, which would otherwise have made data collection difficult), but also will allow us to operate the minigrids in a COVID-sensitive and responsible fashion, since they remove the need to house-to-house fee collection and meter reading visits.
Access to good healthcare is often challenging in the developing world. But this is greatly compounded for people living in remote off-grid rural communities. Such communities usually don't have any local health officer or clinic. And if they do, the facilities are usually poor, because they lack power, communications and equipment. To access even basic healthcare requires a walk of hours, even days, and/or paying for public transport to the nearest town or city, which is expensive and time-consuming, for a journey that may prove quite unnecessary.
Modern ICT, as we are seeing in the COVID pandemic, demonstrates the power of remote videoconferencing. We intend to test an innovative approach to rural healthcare, whereby a community can access the services of a qualified medical profession remotely at a fixed time each week via videoconference. The system will also incorporate some basic medical record keeping, and the community operator of the system will also be trained to take basic diagnostic measurements, like temperature and blood pressure, which can be done easily with cheap devices. Such teleconsultations will often be sufficient to address basic problems and questions, and can also highlight cases where the expense and time of a clinic-visit is justified.
Awaiting Public Project Summary