How Pre-Paid Energy Services Aid In Rural Electrification 38
First time accepted submitter superfast-scooter writes "I wanted to let the community know of a research project I've been fortunate to be part of — it's a rural electrification project called SharedSolar at the Modi Research Group at Columbia University. The project has 17 pilot sites in sub-Saharan Africa to-date, providing prepaid energy services to over 3000 people who did not have access to electricity — a fraction of the over 1.3 Billion worldwide. The lab has been developing custom software applications to integrate off-the-shelf hardware components, and also provide the operational and management mechanisms needed. Communications with the sites are over the mobile networks. Consumers can recharge their accounts using either cellphones, or visit a designated local vendor who can do it at the site using an Android app. Software residing locally makes each site autonomous, and the online platform allows for remote visibility, localized consumer interactions and integration with payment solutions. And we're planning on deploying soon in Haiti and Kenya."
doh! (Score:2, Informative)
Please don't give U.S. utility companies any ideas. The last thing I need is to have to pay bills in advance.
Re:doh! (Score:5, Informative)
In the UK you could have a pre-pay meter installed on request, and also if the electricity company deems you to be a bad risk (refusal to pay debts etc), and has been this way ever since I can remember (I remember my gran having to stick 50p coins into her meter when I was 4 or 5 - a good 30 years ago).
Re:Not new (Score:5, Informative)
I make a comment further down in reply to someone else, but largely its through sales of goods in markets, or other services - I was buying vouchers in denominations as small as 500 Shillings in Uganda, which is about the equivalent of 15 British pence, or 10 cents. And that would do for a 10 minute call.
Charging is done at roadside stalls, usually either off of a mains supply where there is one (and where the person with the phone isn't connected to that supply), petrol generator or just by a kid or two sat all day turning a hand crank. You saw several of these at each roadside trading point, nothing more than a shanty shack with hand painted advertising.
There certainly is money exchanged in rural villages, and these people travel for hours just to make the equivalent of a dollar or two through selling bananas or pineapples. You have to go really rural for money to disappear altogether - I did a lot of traveling in Uganda and we never came across a village which didn't have some form of money transaction going on.
Some clarifications (Score:4, Informative)
I'm the submitter and one of the SWE's on the project. Prepayment meters are not new, and are quite commonly available and in use. Distributing scratch cards for purchase and validation are also not a novelty, and as noted in the summary this is an option we provide. What seems to be uncommon is the use of software management systems at the sites themselves - a high-level one at that, and not logic embedded in hardware like the meters. Because of this, we're able to control several networked devices at the sites, and add on service features as we learn.
Using intermittent renewables like we do (solar), we need to know how much was generated and ensure everyone is guaranteed a fair share. The software provides us that platform. We haven't implemented demand-response [yet] that will help with better management (for eg: cloudy-day scenarios), but do ration based on how much load is plugged in and how much is being consumed by each consumer. This helps to make sure that just a few heavy-duty consumers do not hog all the resources and exhaust the supply all by themselves.
Also, because this is all in software, it doesn't matter what the source is as long as we use devices that we can network and get readings from. In this sense, the generation could be from solar, wind, hydro, or even the old diesel gensets. We went with solar, hence SharedSolar, but it's really SharedSupply.
Another thing to note is that we can adapt and add more features to a service by changes in the software, without the need to make changes in the hardware configurations themselves. We can replicate the same model, or try new ones out, in different settings using different components as we see fit. For instance, we're evaluating different metering devices now but since everything about the service is in the distributed software platform, we only need to get devices that do AMR/AMI, without the need for even basic logic like prepayment. I wrote about where the software intelligence should sit depending on the quality of IP-based communications channels in a blog post here - http://sharedsolar.org/?page_id=13 [sharedsolar.org] .
Also, just by having the software at the site, it allows us the possibility of tuning the service remotely, along with short turn-arounds between malfunctions and fix.
The points others made about reduction in line theft etc are spot-on. One commenter asked if the consumers pay for the cellular interactions - they don't. This is actually a good case for having developed the local vendor solution the consumers seem to prefer - the entrepreneur who used to sell them kerosene is equipped with an Android device and now helps sell prepaid electricity. This was only possible because of the web services we could build on the local software platform and not because of anything inherent in the hardware/meters.
Also, mobile service providers are also slowly getting interested in this space, as they have been with banking, health etc and they are our partners where we deploy. There are also interesting projects where the excess power generated at the base stations are distributed to the nearby populace.
Thanks.
Re:Not new (Score:4, Informative)