An Overview Of Our Solution
Swarm Electrification is the bottom-up (r)evolution of the energy infrastructure in the Global South by interconnecting individual existing and new electricity usages, storages and generations (Solar Home Systems). It enables a peer economy based on prosumerism and local value creation. This efficiently enhances electricity access due to the possibility of peer-to-peer sharing and trading of electricity, reduces the extra investment to reach the point of enhanced access while simultaneously leaving ownership and value creation in the community. The connected parties will act not only as consumers of electricity, but feed energy into the small bottom up created grid, becoming consumers and producers (prosumers) who exchange and trade renewable decentralized electricity as a currency.
- Population Impacted: 108.000
- Continent: Asia
Last name
Organization type
Context Analysis
SDG 1 – No Poverty: SOLshare’s business model promotes universal access to affordable and reliable basic energy services for the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). Through its energy trading platform, equal rights to economic resources and to the low-income communities are promoted, while offering alternative sources of income.
SDG 5 – Gender Equality: Women are able to access electrical lighting for housework and reading, instead of relying on kerosene. Further, women are given the opportunity to participate directly in economic activities when they trade energy.
SDG 13 – Climate Actions: Swarm Electrification enables the adoption of energy solutions that are resource-use efficient and environmentally sound. Additional energy is unlocked by integrating existing infrastructure (e.g. solar home systems, mini-grids).
Until today, 2,200 metric tons of CO2 have been avoided, 47,000 women impacted and more than 108,000 people reached.
Describe the technical solution you wanted the target audience to adopt
Swarm Electrification are the world’s first ICT enabled peer-to-peer electricity trading networks for rural households with any combination of SHS or standalone battery and without solar home systems (SHS) in Bangladesh, allowing for utilization of legacy infrastructure. The trading network interconnects households via a low-voltage DC grid and controls power flows through bi-directional metering integrated with an ICT backend; handling payment, customer service and remote monitoring. Each Swarm controller enables the user to buy and sell renewable electricity with neighboring households, business and rural industry. The trading network allows SHS users to earn income by selling excess renewable electricity, while improving individual system reliability and providing power consumption flexibility through network effects. Marginalized households without the means to finance an SHS are now able to purchase clean electricity from their neighbors, quickly displacing kerosene.
Type of intervention
Describe your behavioral intervention
A Swarm Grid is born where the national grid has not reached; villagers agree on setting up a Swarm network that consists of existing and new SHSs and storage devices owned by the people. Similar to Airbnb, ME SOLshare creates a trading platform in the spirit of the sharing economy. The community platform enables people to form a social distribution clean energy grid. Thus, people build a solar grid themselves and can eventually connect to the national grid. Swarm end-users fall into 3 categories: consumers, producers, & prosumers. Pure consumers are usually poor families (av. family size is 4.5) that cannot afford to buy a solar system (SHS) themselves and have either used kerosene lamps before or rented light/ mobile phone charges from outside their homes at a high cost. With our solution, they save up to 50% of the cost and benefit significantly in convenience and health improvement (kerosene replacement). Prosumers are households or small businesses with SHS who are in need of more power and/or flexibility. Lastly, producers are our smart solar entrepreneurs who avail systems for the sole use of selling the produced renewable electricity to the grid with a profit. The micro businesses incl. village cinemas (large TV), barbers (hair trimmers), computer shops (printer, photocopy & internet), pharmacies (fridge for medication + nebulizer for children with asthma), sewing room (motor), & generally shops with more fans & lights to attract customers.
As needed, please explain the type of intervention in more detail
A Swarm grid is born where the national grid has not reached; villagers agree on setting up a Swarm grid that consists of existing and new SHSs and storage devices owned by the people. Similar to Airbnb, SOLshare creates a community platform in the spirit of the sharing economy – it enables people to form a social distribution clean energy grid. Through Swarm Electrification, value creation and productivity are restored at the level of communities. Through its bottom-up peer-to-peer electrification approach, decentralized use, distribution and control of energy resources are in the hands of people, fostering the development of peer to peer solidarity and entrepreneurial behavior among the energy vulnerable population.
Describe your implementation
In Bangladesh, more than 50 million people, living in densely populated rural areas, do not have access to grid electricity. 4.5 million people use SHS provided under a microloan scheme, making Bangladesh the largest SHS market in units sold. The 4.5M households with SHS, remain unable to power an increasing demand and are often underutilized, resulting in up to 30% lost generation capacity. Thus, the opportunity emerges from interconnecting existing decentralised solar energy generation and storage assets, linking producers, consumers, and prosumers in smart-grids (Swarm grids) enabling energy peer-to-peer transactions. Through B2B partnerships with Partner Orgranizations - POs (Microfinance Institutions), ME SOLshare leverage their existing customer base, marketing, distribution channels and aftersales capacity to create value for POs and users. SOLshare designed and commercialized the world’s first and only low-cost direct-current (DC) bi-directional power meter and solar charge controller that functions as an individual node of a DC electricity trading network, enabling users to buy and sell electricity at a micro-scale in off-grid setting. The plug-and-play nature of the technology allows the grid to grow dynamically from the ‘bottom-up’ as more users can dynamically connect over time. The digital platform facilitates electricity sharing between users. In terms of challenges, technology adoption in this end-user segment is difficult. Citizens in rural areas of Bangladesh and similar countries are usually not familiar with smart-grid technology. However, SOLshare relies on the solid knowledge and direct relationships that its clients and partners have with the end-users.
External connections
○ GSMA - seed funding, technical assistance and mentoring
○ Supergroup - strategic advice for conducting business in the local context
○ Asian Development Bank - development of the swarm concept as new alternative for rural electrification
○ bKash - largest mobile money company in the world by number of accounts, integration of mobile payments in the SOLshare platform
○ Microenergy International – founder and inventor of Swarm Electrification, business consulting in renewable energy, supply chain and technology, R&D partner
○ Infrastructure Development Company Limited IDCOL - collaboration in development of standards of P2P grids as a electrification standard
○ Grameen Shakti – partnership for implementation of Swarm Grids for the next three years; partnership was awarded UNDESA’s Powering the Future We Want
Who adopted the desired behaviors and to what degree?
Women Consumers: Though Swarm Electrification energy trading, over 8,600 consumer households (including 13,500 women) are able to access over 700 MWh of additional energy, valued at approximately USD 508,863. With access to reliable energy, over 2,700 consumers running microbusinesses (including 300 women) experience additional income valued at USD 192,463.
Women Prosumers: Over 26,000 prosumer households (including 32,000 women) are able to access over 2,600 MWh of additional energy, valued at approximately USD 1,824,084. With access to reliable energy, over 12,000 prosumers running microbusinesses (including 1,400 women) experience additional income valued at USD 836,942. By selling excess energy of over 1,200 MWh, prosumers are able to earn additional income from the trading platform, worth approximately USD 1,495,325.
Producers of Electricity: By selling excess energy of over 1,800 MWh, over 8,600 producers are able to earn additional income from worth approximately USD 931,384.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
Connected into a Swarm grid, households replace polluting energy sources such as kerosene lamps, firewood, candles, disposable batteries. Both GHG emissions and the environmental impact of obtaining and disposing of such technologies is reduced. Conservatively assuming that 50% of end-users double their solar-PV capacity (starting 40 Wp) each year in the first two years, each Swarm controller unlocks 40 Wp*2*2*0.5 = 80 Wp of solar-PV installed capacity. 80 Wp equates to approximately 80 Wp*0.6*4.5 hrs*365 days = 80 kWh per year, which we estimate equates to (1/0.3) *0.27 kgCo2/kWh * 80 kWh = 72 kgCO2 of diesel electricity generation emissions avoided per Swarm controller. By enabling the use of appliances with high energy demand that conventional stand-alone SHS cannot power, diesel generators commonly used in rural areas for water pumps, grain mills, are replaced. Finally, communities do not suffer from noise pollution from these generators and reduce the risk of fuel cost volatility.
What were some of the resulting co-benefits?
Swarm Electrification contributes to climate change adaptation through increased adaptive capacities and poverty reduction by improved access to reliable and affordable energy based services. Adaptive capacities of the rural low-income populations are facilitated through livelihood enhancement and diversification. Swarm Electrification promotes clean electrification for agricultural and off-farm productive use which enables new and higher income opportunities in changing climate. Livelihood resilience is needed for better coping with increased climate variability, climate extremes and disasters. Through the integration of efficient appliances, agricultural productivity, which is critical to establishing reserves in food-insecure areas, is increased. Secure water access is a key livelihood resource. The Swarm grids allow increased use of water solutions to limit the vulnerabilities caused by drinking water scarcities due to salt water intrusion and droughts.
Sustainability
The Swarm Electrification solution does not rely on any type of government subsidy. During the start-up phase of the company, initial capital was grant and own equity based, until the solution was rolled out and started reaching scale. Currently, in its growth phase, SOLshare relies on a combination of market-based revenue from the selling of the Swarm Controller (SOLbox), administrative fee on traded electricity and data management, grant for further research and development of technology, and equity investments from corporate shareholders. Within the next five years, it is expected that SOLshare will reach breakeven and be completely sustainable from its market revenue.
Return on investment
To date, SOLshare has raised USD 600,000 USD. Personal equity equals USD 270,000. Private Loans from founders and management are USD 95,000. Seed funding and R&D contributions equal USD 355.000 from GIZ, WB/ IDCOL, ADB, GSMA, Startup Energy Transition Award and The Renewable Transformation Challenge. We raised USD 400,000 through a seed Investment Round. UNDESA awarded 1 Mio USD grant to the partnership between SOLshare and Grameen Shakti for the scale up of the Swarm Grids in the next three years.
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
• India – In collaboration with CYGNI Energy, the replication will demonstrate a bottom-up micro-energy transition towards inclusive, reliable and affordable renewable energy services in predominantly poor rural Assamese communities in order to alleviate energy-related poverty, stimulate sustainable economic development and improve local living conditions. The project is co-funded by GIZ India, the German Energy Agency (DENA) and additional co-funding is required for hardware piloting.
• Colombia – In collaboration with EnergEIA (EIA), the goal is to implement a Swarm Electrification grid in EIA’s campus to enable energy services for students, provide a technology platform for research, showcase the technology to EIA's strong network and integrate the grid with the experimental campus energy infrastructure including a 60 kW PV plant, EV charging stations and micro-PV installations from 0.1 to 6 kW.