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.

Smart Biogas (tm) is a patent pending, remote monitoring platform designed to monitor increasing numbers of geographically dispersed household/institutional biogas digesters at minimal cost across the world. Smart Biogas collects data on individual biogas digesters' performance and usage, allowing detection of potential faults or substandard installation/operation. This data is transmitted to a cloud platform where the data is, through this project, automatically processed and made intelligible to the user for, example through notifications, to facilitate prompt repairs or further user training. Hardware and software was designed and successfully piloted with Energy Catalyst Round 7 funding (No.105909) (EC7) . Over the course of EC7, we released a MVP (Minimum Viable Product/first release) of the metering hardware and web-application, and recorded over 55 million hourly reports on biogas performance from around the world and published two academic papers. This MVP product allowed the metering to happen and display the information in a web-application but, valuable and unique as that product already is, at this stage it does not add any additional intelligence to the data. This grant would allow us to develop a number of other features for commercial release including: * Enhanced analytics for preventive maintenance and diagnostics for biogas plants * Finalise Carbon Credit reporting * Enhanced sensing hardware to provide further data points * Robustness development of the existing product and for wider use cases including larger commercial digesters * Further academic papers and knowledge dissemination Ultimately we seek to address financial barriers and operational inefficiencies enabling viable biogas-as-a-service commercial models, enhancing company operations and providing additional income streams. Smart Biogas provides a powerful tool that facilitates increased access to biogas technology for more people, especially the rural poor. The project is led by Inclusive Energy Ltd, with support from prominent actors in the biogas sector in East Africa, Kenya Biogas Program and Biogas Solutions Uganda, academic input from the University of Nottingham, and larger scale commercial pilots with Green Impact Technologies (Malawi) and Grassroots Energy (India).

Cooling infrastructure - fridges and freezers - are vital for commerce, home use and for preserving medication, vaccinations and food. Unlike many off-grid solar energy systems, cooling solutions must operate as close to 24/7 as possible to ensure there is little/no wastage and are therefore subject to 'over-specification', leading to high energy system costs. In addition, when using a solar system to power a fridge, there are multiple issues that can interrupt the power supply including faults on the solar, battery or load sides, tampering, incorrectly sized systems or low energy yield due to poor weather. This project brings together a consortium of companies that seek to solve these issues so that project partners Focus Energy and Koolboks can offer a higher quality and easier to manage cooling services for customers in West Africa. To do this, the project builds on Inclusive Energy's remote monitoring system, Cloud Solar, and will seek to develop data modelling and machine learning techniques with both the live data and meta-data to deliver insights to cooling service providers and their customers. As well as reacting to faults and issues that have already occurred, the project will investigate and develop a solution to provide predictive maintenance for a range of issues including predicting the end of life of the batteries and predicting probable system issues such as lack of energy availability. These issues can then be mitigated with sophisticated load shedding and controls via the Cloud Solar charge controller, along with alerts for the solar system owners and providers to advise on energy saving techniques. Therefore, the project proposes development of 3 parallel and integrated capabilities: (1) analyse, (2) forecast, (3) mitigate. Inclusive Energy will work with Koolboks and, Focus Energy, and their West African customers, to ensure that the insights are relevant and that the user interface is fit for purpose.

ECOSMART:2 will demonstrate the smart integration of a novel, enhanced anaerobic digestion (AD) process with solar technology to form the basis of a circular economy model, providing affordable, clean, secure energy access. Through development and operation of the ECOSMART:2 modules, new integrated UK-Nigerian enterprises and supply chains will be established, aligning social and gender considerations with economic and environmental benefits. With a focus on valorising agri/food waste streams (e.g. cassava and water hyacinth), ECOSMART:2 will ensure a high proportion of beneficiaries are women and those on low incomes. ECOSMART:2 will build on the consortium's expertise, utilising locally available materials and low-cost components to ensure affordability, and reducing feedstock retention time through system design to to accelerate the AD process. It will also produce soil amenders and fertiliser to replace expensive, synthetic fertilisers, thus supporting local, sustainable agricultural practices. With a 4.5-year payback, this model of affordable, low carbon, secure bioenergy will tap into Nigeria's £7.45Bn microgrid market to support enterprise and capacity building opportunities with operator training and local manufacture as well as up-skilling both upstream and downstream enterprises/supply chains for the provision of feedstock and the sale of energy and fertiliser. AD and control systems will be adapted by UK SMEs for global commercial opportunities. With a focus on flexible energy use and affordability, advances in demand-side management and microgrid technology, ECOSMART:2 presents developing countries with an opportunity to leapfrog expensive, centralised infrastructure.

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Smart Biogas is an Internet of Things (IoT) platform monitoring numerous geographically dispersed household/institutional biogas digesters at minimal cost. Smart Biogas collects data on individual biogas digesters' functionality, allowing detection of potential faults or substandard installation/operation. This data is transmitted to a cloud platform where it facilitates prompt repairs or further user training. Hardware and software was designed and successfully prototyped with Energy Catalyst Round 4 funding (No.132479). Further market research, user testing and feedback has key enhancements that would enable the biogas companies to scale their operations more rapidly and access currently unreached markets. The additional features including pay-as-you-go functionality, enhanced analytics and carbon offset verification, seek to address financial barriers and operational inefficiencies enabling viable biogas-as-a-service commercial models, enhancing company operations and providing additional income streams. Smart Biogas provides a powerful tool that facilitates increased access to biogas technology for more people, especially the rural poor. The project is led by Connected Energy Technologies, with support from prominent actors in the biogas sector in East Africa, Kenya Biogas Program and Biogas Solutions Uganda, along with technical input from the University of Nottingham.

ECOSMART explores the techno-economic feasibility of smart integration of a novel, enhanced anaerobic digestion (AD) process with solar technology to form the basis of a circular economy model. It will establish an integrated UK Nigerian supply chain, aligning social and gender considerations with economic and environmental benefits. Its focus on valorising cassava, yam, corn and mixed market wastes will ensure a high proportion of beneficiaries are women and those on low incomes. ECOSMART will build on the consortium's expertise, utilising locally available materials and low-cost components to ensure affordability, and reducing feedstock retention time through system design to process waste and generate biogas 4x faster than conventional Continuous Stirred Reactor Tank (CSTR) systems. It will also produce soil amenders and fertiliser in a ratio beneficial for soil management, thus supporting local, sustainable agricultural practices. With a 4.5-year payback, this model of affordable, low carbon, secure bioenergy will tap into Nigeria's £7.45B minigrid market to support enterprise and capacity building opportunities with training planned at later stages of the project to support local manufacture. Control systems will be adapted by UK SMEs for global commercial opportunities. The focus on flexible energy use and affordability will advance demand-side management and minigrid technology, so developing countries can leapfrog centralised infrastructure to pioneer innovative, more equitable models of generation, distribution and use.

There has been significant investment into solar panels and biogas digesters within Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the poorest members of off-grid communities remain unable to afford these assets, and are prohibited from accessing such energy sources, whilst those with assets have an energy supply that exceeds the capacity of their current storage options and/or their own consumption needs. Modifying existing techniques and technologies for combined application in a new context, will create opportunities for business model innovation. This will enable surplus energy generated to be packaged into bitesize amounts for distribution via virtual, rather than physical, grids or transferred to other productive uses. As a result, the Smart Energy Exchange Network (SEEN), will facilitate greater entry level access to low carbon, energy supplies for those at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid as well as transformative change at a community level through the provision of new energy services (refrigeration, milling, irrigation).

Establishing Mutually Beneficial Local Energy Markets 2 (EMBLEM 2) will test the feasibility of peer-to-peer energy trading for the Global South in two novel ways. The first P2P market is an evolving standalone DC nanogrid for rural off-grid areas that can grow as and when end users choose to invest in new generation, storage and demand appliances. The second P2P market is AC on-grid urban and peri-urban locations where there are significant network constraints and the cost of adding renewable energy is unaffordable. EMBLEM integrates cutting-edge UK innovations from Scene Connect, Swanbarton and Connected Energy Technologies and is supported by international partners Dassy Enterprise and GhamPower in Rwanda and Nepal, respectively. This product will disrupt current energy markets by increasing the viability of small-scale renewable energy installations, and the ability of AC and DC electrical grids to incorporate them. The Global South will benefit most from the resultant technology.