Speaker 1: Pushkin, I may have Higgins and this is solvable. Interviews
Speaker 1: with the world's most innovative thinkers who are working to
Speaker 1: solve the world's biggest problems. My solvable is to take
Speaker 1: energy to where communities are. We are not going to
Speaker 1: solve poverty in the twenty first century if we don't
Speaker 1: solve energy poverty. This is a truly energizing conversation between
Speaker 1: an Applebaum and Ashvin Diale about well energy. The solvable
Speaker 1: this episode is how to bring reliable electricity to rural
Speaker 1: communities across India and Africa. Ashvin leads the Rockefeller Foundation's
Speaker 1: effort to not only end energy poverty, but also to
Speaker 1: unleash economic opportunity across the world. One point two billion
Speaker 1: people do not have electricity. If you've experienced living without electricity,
Speaker 1: even for a day or two, you'll know how frustrating
Speaker 1: it is, how small tasks suddenly become huge and everything
Speaker 1: takes so much longer. On a bigger scale, energy poverty
Speaker 1: is a massive impediment to sustained economic and social growth.
Speaker 1: The alternatives to electricity are not ideal. Nearly three billion
Speaker 1: people cook or heat their homes by burning polluting fuels
Speaker 1: like wood, and of course that results in air pollution
Speaker 1: that causes widespread health problems. Now things are improving, just slowly.
Speaker 1: According to the latest data from the UN, eighty five
Speaker 1: percent of the global population now has access to basic
Speaker 1: electricity services. Mostly this has been down to government's efforts
Speaker 1: in extending national grids as well as some off gride
Speaker 1: decentralized projects. But for Ashvin diale the challenges to reach
Speaker 1: every last person. Ashman leads the Rockefeller Foundations Global Smart
Speaker 1: Power Initiative. He has overseen the Foundations investments in renewable
Speaker 1: energy mini grades in India and it's working to achieve
Speaker 1: electrification for everybody in India, no matter where they live.
Speaker 1: You think this is something that everyone would be on
Speaker 1: board for, you know, But Ashvin says that's not the case.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of the diesel mafia. Well, let's
Speaker 1: take a listen and I'll speak to you after. When
Speaker 1: people speak about something so vast as a billion people
Speaker 1: without electricity, a lot of people would just be distressed
Speaker 1: by that. They would think this is too big a problem.
Speaker 1: I can't solve it, I can't think about it. When
Speaker 1: you originally approached this problem, how did you think about it.
Speaker 1: What led you to the solutions that you found. Did
Speaker 1: you break up the problem, did you took a piece
Speaker 1: of it? What was the thought process that you went through. Well,
Speaker 1: I think the first thing I really thought about is
Speaker 1: why is this even a problem? Why do we care
Speaker 1: about the fact that a billion people don't have access
Speaker 1: to electricity? When you look at the world around you
Speaker 1: today and you see how economies are more interconnected. When
Speaker 1: you see how what you do in a village can
Speaker 1: be connected to what's happening in the markets in the
Speaker 1: nearby towns, and then what's happening in the cities when
Speaker 1: you look at the level of international trade. The pathway
Speaker 1: to prosperity is in fact an energy dependent pathway. If
Speaker 1: you want to move a little bit up the valued
Speaker 1: chain as a farmer, you need to have some processing.
Speaker 1: You need to have some cold storage, you need to
Speaker 1: have some transportation, you need to have irrigation, all of
Speaker 1: these things that slowly incrementally allow a smallholder in rural
Speaker 1: Uganda or in Bihar in India to actually move up
Speaker 1: the ladder. Once you sort of get your head around why,
Speaker 1: then you start to kind of break it down and say, well,
Speaker 1: why isn't it getting fixed. Why are there a billion people?
Speaker 1: And yes, it can seem daunting, but if you think
Speaker 1: back twenty years ago, probably four billion people didn't have
Speaker 1: access to any form of communications. The world was waiting
Speaker 1: for landlines to reach the farthest points of every part
Speaker 1: of India or southern Africa. And then along came mobile technology,
Speaker 1: and within a generation or less, almost everyone on the
Speaker 1: planet is able to access communications, is able to speak
Speaker 1: to people, is able to download information. So this possibility
Speaker 1: of disruption and the possibility of applying the latest that
Speaker 1: we have in technology to another sector like energy, was
Speaker 1: something that we started to really experiment with and look
Speaker 1: at quite deeply seven or eight years ago, as we
Speaker 1: saw the price of solar technology coming down, as we
Speaker 1: saw new small companies starting to experiment with becoming essentially
Speaker 1: stand alone utilities providers of electricity into communities that the
Speaker 1: big companies, the big utilities just weren't prepared to go
Speaker 1: because they saw them as loss making and we saw
Speaker 1: an opportunity. And it's from there that we really started
Speaker 1: to build our understanding of what the problem is, how
Speaker 1: it could be solved, and the role that we could
Speaker 1: play in it, and the solution you saw was to
Speaker 1: use smaller units of energy or smaller kinds of energy generation,
Speaker 1: including just individual solar cells. People can have individual small
Speaker 1: sources of energy rather than needing to be connected to
Speaker 1: a big grid. So yes, lighting in the home is
Speaker 1: extremely important, you know, for a child to do their
Speaker 1: studies at night, for women to feel safe, and you know,
Speaker 1: just for your personal quality of life to be able
Speaker 1: to plug in a fan so that you can stay
Speaker 1: cool in often what are extremely hot climates, to be
Speaker 1: able to charge your mobile phone that we talked about,
Speaker 1: you know, not being available twenty years ago. Those are
Speaker 1: all extremely important facets of sort of social life and
Speaker 1: well being that are extremely extremely important. But if you
Speaker 1: also want to power irrigation pumps, if you also want
Speaker 1: to allow a carpenter to use mechanized tools, if you
Speaker 1: also want to help a small collective of farmers do
Speaker 1: their processing of their wheat, the grinding of their wheat
Speaker 1: on site so that they get a better price, you
Speaker 1: need a slightly higher grade of electricity than just what
Speaker 1: a home system can provide. So that took us to
Speaker 1: what we call minigrids. These are essentially anywhere between twenty
Speaker 1: to five hundred kilowat, so less than a megawatt standalone
Speaker 1: power systems. They have solar panels, they have the power electronics,
Speaker 1: and you have a little grid maybe one or two
Speaker 1: kilometer radius, supplying the village, supplying the homes, supplying the businesses,
Speaker 1: and sort of decoupled from the national grid. That's the
Speaker 1: sort of area that we felt was most important because
Speaker 1: it brought both the economic development opportunity together with improving
Speaker 1: quality of life inside the home. Right, So these aren't
Speaker 1: individual power sources. It's a mini a small power source
Speaker 1: for a small area, typically for a village. Let's say
Speaker 1: it's a ville with two hundred households. That's a thousand people.
Speaker 1: You have one system. It may serve say a hundred
Speaker 1: of those households because the other hundred maybe still can't
Speaker 1: afford this power. It'll serve twenty or thirty businesses, maybe
Speaker 1: twenty or thirty shops in that area. Sometimes it'll even
Speaker 1: serve a cell tower that was previously dependent on diesel
Speaker 1: in order to operate. So, yes, these are small systems,
Speaker 1: but they're larger than the individual homes, and so they
Speaker 1: need an ecosystem of companies and government policies and other
Speaker 1: things to be available in order for the sector to flourish.
Speaker 1: Was there a particular technological breakthrough that was necessary. Is
Speaker 1: there some form of energy generation that you couldn't have
Speaker 1: done twenty years ago that you can do now that
Speaker 1: makes this work? Well? I mean, I think the biggest
Speaker 1: breakthrough we've seen is with solar. We've all in different ways,
Speaker 1: seen the amazing and dramatic, frankly drop in cost of
Speaker 1: solar and the efficiency of solar panels over the last
Speaker 1: fifteen to twenty years. It's come down by sort of
Speaker 1: almost ten x so technology per se, but it's the
Speaker 1: price of technology that's really been most important that started
Speaker 1: to allow us to get to that sweet spot where
Speaker 1: these systems can actually work. They can generate power at
Speaker 1: a price that communities are able to pay and willing
Speaker 1: to pay because they see the benefits for themselves and
Speaker 1: they see the improved incomes. They're still expensive and they
Speaker 1: still need to come down further. So there are still
Speaker 1: things that have to happen for this to absolutely spread
Speaker 1: like wildfire, if you like, the way mobile phones did
Speaker 1: twenty years ago. And that's essentially the thing that we're
Speaker 1: trying to solve is how do we take this great idea,
Speaker 1: this great opportunity, and get it to the point where
Speaker 1: it can truly take off. Is that really a commercial question?
Speaker 1: Is it to do with selling it, Is it to
Speaker 1: do with distributing it? What are the big obstacles to
Speaker 1: installing these minigrids? So the installing of the minigrid is
Speaker 1: actually the simplest part of it. It is a commercial challenge.
Speaker 1: You are trying to serve the poorest end of the market.
Speaker 1: These are consumers that utilities don't go to because they
Speaker 1: see them as loss making for every unit of electricity
Speaker 1: they sell. It's understanding demand. Is treating low income households
Speaker 1: in rural Myanma or India as consumers as an addressable market.
Speaker 1: But understanding that market, what do they actually need? How
Speaker 1: much can they pay? How do you supply it in
Speaker 1: a way that is flexible to their needs? So not
Speaker 1: just saying here's a meter consumer, as much power as
Speaker 1: you want, and we'll give you a bill at the
Speaker 1: end of the month, and you know, all of a
Speaker 1: sudden you realize you can't afford it. But actually, maybe
Speaker 1: what you need is a package so that you can
Speaker 1: create over time, as a minigrid operator, a viable business.
Speaker 1: That's probably one of the biggest challenges, and honestly, we're
Speaker 1: not there yet. We still need to innovate. We need
Speaker 1: to drive prices down, we need to get better at
Speaker 1: predicting what the demand will be in any given village
Speaker 1: so that people can size the systems appropriately. And we
Speaker 1: also need help from a government in the sense of
Speaker 1: seeing this as part of their solution. Governments take on
Speaker 1: electrification as sort of a national mission. This is what
Speaker 1: they do. You have ministries of energy and ministries of electricity,
Speaker 1: but they have tended to adopt a single solution, which
Speaker 1: is we'll extend the grid and we'll keep extending it
Speaker 1: as quickly as we can, and you know it'll get
Speaker 1: to you when it gets to you, and there's a
Speaker 1: massive opportunity cost around that. So it's really the dialogue
Speaker 1: with government to saying, look, we can build the grid
Speaker 1: from the outside in, but you need to create a
Speaker 1: policy environment that allows a many grid developer to go
Speaker 1: out somewhere and not worry that in five years if
Speaker 1: the grid arrives, they suddenly have a stranded asset. You
Speaker 1: may need to look at what sort of fiscal or
Speaker 1: tax incentives you can give to offset some of the
Speaker 1: commercial challenges that still exist. And most importantly, we need
Speaker 1: to plan electrification as a combination of grid and off
Speaker 1: grid and choose the best solutions in the areas where
Speaker 1: they make the most sense. If you have a village
Speaker 1: right next to the grid, it probably makes sense to
Speaker 1: just extend the grid there. But if you have another
Speaker 1: community of a thousand people ten kilometers away from the grid,
Speaker 1: it actually doesn't make sense to extend the grid five
Speaker 1: years from now. It makes a lot more sense to
Speaker 1: create the incentives and the policies that allow a minigrid
Speaker 1: operator to set up an independent system there and rather
Speaker 1: than that community waiting five or six or seven or
Speaker 1: eight years, you can have one of these systems up
Speaker 1: in three months. But it takes collaboration. It takes us
Speaker 1: at a public private partnership sort of mindset for this
Speaker 1: to happen. And that's a lot about what I'm trying
Speaker 1: to inspire in working with both companies as well as investors,
Speaker 1: as well as governments, and then, of course, most importantly,
Speaker 1: community organizations on the ground. And do you have a
Speaker 1: set of tactics. Is there a way to talk to
Speaker 1: governments to seeing it from your point of view. You
Speaker 1: can have all of the evidence in the world, right,
Speaker 1: you can put together all the reports you want, all
Speaker 1: of the policy papers, you can go into your sort
Speaker 1: of dialogues with government, and we do all of that,
Speaker 1: but there's nothing like sort of seeing is believing. So
Speaker 1: actually bringing regulators, people from the distribution companies and the utilities,
Speaker 1: from the ministries to these sites, showing them what many
Speaker 1: grid operators are going and saying, look, you should actually
Speaker 1: be claiming this. You should be saying this is part
Speaker 1: of the government's effort to electrify everyone. So one tactic
Speaker 1: is just the seeing is believing, right, There is also
Speaker 1: just making the business case for it. From a kind
Speaker 1: of national economic development point of view, there is an
Speaker 1: opportunity cost to not electrifying a village in today's modern economy.
Speaker 1: It means that village can't participate in all of the
Speaker 1: opportunities that are out there, whether it's in the agricultural
Speaker 1: sector or off farm. I think the thing that often
Speaker 1: resonates the most with government is when you say, look,
Speaker 1: this is actually a development play. This is not just
Speaker 1: an infrast structure project. This is about unleashing new economic opportunity.
Speaker 1: It's about addressing the poverty challenge that you as a
Speaker 1: government care centrally about. So it's the narrative here that
Speaker 1: we have to see this as a national development effort,
Speaker 1: not just an infrastructure effort and the human development effort.
Speaker 1: And then thirdly, you have to show the hard economics
Speaker 1: of it and show that you can actually save money
Speaker 1: overall if you are more thoughtful about how you combine
Speaker 1: grid investments and off grid investments, blending both the best
Speaker 1: of the public what the public sector can bring and
Speaker 1: what the private sector can bring. Just to give you
Speaker 1: an example, you know, there is this idea of a
Speaker 1: results based financing. You know, so no country in the
Speaker 1: world has actually electrified its entire population without some level
Speaker 1: of government investment and public finance. And what we're saying
Speaker 1: is you can incentivize through these results based finance schemes
Speaker 1: private operators to go and set these mini grids up
Speaker 1: in communities that your grid operators are not ready to
Speaker 1: go to and for a fraction of the cost of
Speaker 1: the subsidy that you would provide to the grid, instead
Speaker 1: providers as some sort of performance based incentive to a
Speaker 1: private company. Let them go there, and you know, you're
Speaker 1: creating a quicker solution, it can be more sustainable sort
Speaker 1: of commercially in the medium term, and eventually you can
Speaker 1: integrate this all back into a single what we would
Speaker 1: call a sort of a smart grid, which is a
Speaker 1: grid that you know, where you can have flows going
Speaker 1: both ways between the consumers and the generators of power.
Speaker 1: And once you put that sort of vision in front
Speaker 1: of ministries and government officials, yeah, you know, you start
Speaker 1: to find eyes sort of lighting up and champions emerging.
Speaker 1: Tell me about your work with private entrepreneurs. Is that
Speaker 1: very different from the government. Is there are there kind
Speaker 1: of buccaneering entrepreneurial people running minigrid companies whom you can
Speaker 1: offer advice to or is this something that you have
Speaker 1: to spend a lot of time persuading people that this
Speaker 1: is a good thing to do. I'd say five years
Speaker 1: ago it was a bit of a Wild West kind
Speaker 1: of feeling where there were a bunch of well intentioned
Speaker 1: social entrepreneurs and quite small companies going out and trying
Speaker 1: to you know, were just a strong conviction around renewable
Speaker 1: energy and around energy access to poor communities, and you know,
Speaker 1: were largely although they were companies, they were relying a
Speaker 1: lot on grant funding to get the early proof of
Speaker 1: concepts out, and we had to certainly encourage companies at
Speaker 1: a slightly larger scale to spot the opportunity. In India.
Speaker 1: We must have spoken to I would say about seventy
Speaker 1: five to maybe as much as a hundred different companies
Speaker 1: who are in some way related to the energy space,
Speaker 1: but we're not specifically working on rural electrification. So maybe
Speaker 1: they were equipment manufacturers for some of the systems, you know,
Speaker 1: solar manufacturers, or they work companies doing energy supply to
Speaker 1: cell towers in rural areas, so they were some way
Speaker 1: connected to the ecosystem, but they hadn't quite seen this
Speaker 1: as an opportunity. That list whittled down from seventy five
Speaker 1: two hundred down to less than ten that really wanted
Speaker 1: to then get in because this was still seen as
Speaker 1: a young field, a market that was unproven and frankly
Speaker 1: high risk, and so even though we were able to
Speaker 1: provide them with concessional capital with like low cost loans,
Speaker 1: it was still a big risk for them to enter.
Speaker 1: Those that have have started to do, you know, reasonably well.
Speaker 1: The first company that we invested in India called Omnigrid
Speaker 1: micropower co operation has gone on to raise about ten
Speaker 1: times as much capital from other investors to expand their
Speaker 1: operations and are doing really well. And what about the
Speaker 1: recipients the people for whom these grids are being built.
Speaker 1: Do they say, why aren't we being connected to the
Speaker 1: main grid? Do they appreciate this kind of this innovative technology,
Speaker 1: and do they like the idea of it? Or is
Speaker 1: there some resistance? There's very little resistance if the service
Speaker 1: that's provided is high quality and it is truly customer oriented.
Speaker 1: What you tend to find is a lot of frustration
Speaker 1: with the national grids, with state owned utilities that have
Speaker 1: been providing a very erratic service, making promises that they
Speaker 1: can't then meet our experiences. Somewhere between ninety seven to
Speaker 1: ninety eight percent collection efficiency, which is basically an industry
Speaker 1: term for you know, how much of your revenue are
Speaker 1: you actually recovering on time relatively high levels of customer satisfaction. So,
Speaker 1: using industry benchmarks for customer satisfaction, you know, it's sort
Speaker 1: of seventy eighty eighty five percent, which is regarded as
Speaker 1: pretty good when you consider that most large utilities have
Speaker 1: satisfaction ratings at fifty five sixty percent, and that's probably
Speaker 1: true even in the developed world, and we're utilities in
Speaker 1: rural India and Africa used to thinking in terms of
Speaker 1: customer satisfaction or was that also something you not at all? Right?
Speaker 1: I mean they saw the last mild customer as a
Speaker 1: loss making beneficiary of some government program rather than a
Speaker 1: viable consumer. So the relationship is completely different between these
Speaker 1: private companies and consumers. There is an accountability, there is
Speaker 1: a service standard that has met, there's a complaints mechanism,
Speaker 1: and at the end of the day, if you have
Speaker 1: an unhappy customer, you have a bottom line that's getting affected.
Speaker 1: So there's some sort of basic commercial incentives to perform. Now,
Speaker 1: all of that said, your original question about the grid
Speaker 1: being a preference is also an important question because grid
Speaker 1: electricity is by and large significantly cheaper because it's subsidized.
Speaker 1: So there is a larger sort of question about well,
Speaker 1: is it fair that a low income consumer in rural
Speaker 1: Bihar or in rural Uganda is paying an equivalent rate
Speaker 1: per unit of electricy that is higher than what an
Speaker 1: urban consumer or a periurban consumer is paying when supplied
Speaker 1: by the grid. And I guess you know. The answer
Speaker 1: to that is fundamentally no, it's not fair. But is
Speaker 1: it beneficial to them in terms of improving their incomes,
Speaker 1: improving the quality of their life, and helping them reduce
Speaker 1: the costs of consuming alternative, dirty and expensive fuels like
Speaker 1: kerosene or diesel. Absolutely. So these are informed consumers who
Speaker 1: vote with their feet. They make the choices that they
Speaker 1: know benefit them. We must address that question over time.
Speaker 1: That's why we talk about building the grid from the
Speaker 1: outside in and eventually integrating because at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, in ten years time, not only do we
Speaker 1: want everyone to have access to electricity, but it needs
Speaker 1: to be affordable, it needs to be reliable, it needs
Speaker 1: to be equitable, and so we still have big, big
Speaker 1: questions to deal with. And doessolar itself have an appeal?
Speaker 1: Do people say, wow, this is a kind of energy.
Speaker 1: They can see that it's clean, it doesn't produce smoke,
Speaker 1: it comes from the son That is that appealing or
Speaker 1: is that does that give people the sense that it's
Speaker 1: not not reliable. It's appealing to governments, it's appealing to investors,
Speaker 1: it's appealing to people who care about climate change. So
Speaker 1: it has multiple appeals. But if you look at it
Speaker 1: from the through the lens of the actual consumer sitting
Speaker 1: in their home in in one of these places, it's
Speaker 1: what is it displacing? Right, So it's not that it's solar,
Speaker 1: it's that I don't have a smoke filled room with
Speaker 1: because I'm using a kerosene lamp. If I'm a small shopkeeper,
Speaker 1: it's not that it's solar. It's that I don't have
Speaker 1: a little diesel generator right next to me, you know,
Speaker 1: making a hell of a racket and and spewing out
Speaker 1: noxious fumes. I often say, Look, these are some of
Speaker 1: the lowest consumers of energy in the world. I think
Speaker 1: we have an obligation, given where we are as a planet,
Speaker 1: to make sure that the energy system of the future
Speaker 1: is green and is sustainable, and is largely based on
Speaker 1: renewable energy. I would not put the responsibility for that
Speaker 1: transition on the shoulders of the people that we are
Speaker 1: trying to serve. We promote renewable technology with these consumers
Speaker 1: because it offers a disruptive solution to get energy to
Speaker 1: them in a way that hasn't ever happened before. Anytime
Speaker 1: you've when you've been working on this problem and trying
Speaker 1: to carry it out. Can you think of moments of
Speaker 1: real frustration? I mean are there people or companies or
Speaker 1: incidents that made you think, you know, this is never
Speaker 1: going to work or it's just not going to happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: every day. You know, anytime you're trying to do something
Speaker 1: that is different, you often come up against forces that
Speaker 1: perhaps comfortable with the status quo. When we set up
Speaker 1: the first set of minigrids in India, you know, there
Speaker 1: were mysterious things would happen. Lines would get cut in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night, wires would be ripped down,
Speaker 1: poles would be destroyed, and we covered over time that
Speaker 1: there were interests in the diesel ecosystem in that area,
Speaker 1: the diesel mafias it's called, that wanted to see this fail.
Speaker 1: But you know, once communities start to see that they're
Speaker 1: really benefiting from it, that they actually create a sort
Speaker 1: of an almost like an invisible ring of protection around
Speaker 1: that because if the people who are ultimately consuming this
Speaker 1: want it, they find ways of making sure that it
Speaker 1: doesn't get as disrupted. So we had some of that
Speaker 1: early on. You know, the thing I worry most about
Speaker 1: is probably I mean, there's a lot of things I
Speaker 1: worry about, But there's a couple of areas where I
Speaker 1: feel like we really have to see the biggest breakthrough.
Speaker 1: One is in government and in being able to really
Speaker 1: despite all of the openness that there might be to
Speaker 1: wanting to solve this problem. There are also some fairly
Speaker 1: traditional and calcified ways of thinking about electrification. But also
Speaker 1: there are champions within all of these countries who are
Speaker 1: picking that battle. How sympathetic are the other cutting edge
Speaker 1: technology companies who are thinking about electricity and so on
Speaker 1: in different in different ways. How sympathetic are they? Is
Speaker 1: this problem? Do you have very Do you have trouble
Speaker 1: getting big companies to focus on this kind of issue?
Speaker 1: Not at all. I think there's actually it's more than
Speaker 1: just sympathetic. A lot of these companies see this as
Speaker 1: a market. I mean this is, like I said, a
Speaker 1: billion people, and they are starting to invest. If you
Speaker 1: look at every major energy utility at a global level,
Speaker 1: from NL to energy to shell to total, each and
Speaker 1: every one of them has an off grade a rural
Speaker 1: electrification business unit that is starting to explore what they
Speaker 1: can do, starting to make I would say small and
Speaker 1: mid size investments in this space and What we're trying
Speaker 1: to do is nudge them along and say this is great.
Speaker 1: Let's keep working together. Let us do the things that
Speaker 1: maybe you as a company can't invest in to help
Speaker 1: open up the sectors whole. And we hope that there
Speaker 1: are more of them going to be poised to enter
Speaker 1: into this market. We are in partnership with several of
Speaker 1: them now and I think there's only going to be
Speaker 1: more coming in in the future. So it's not just
Speaker 1: about being sympathetic, it's it's very much in their own
Speaker 1: interests to see decentralized renewable energy as the way of
Speaker 1: the future. Are you expecting at some point for there
Speaker 1: to be a kind of tipping point whereby the delivery
Speaker 1: of this kind of energy will be commercially viable and
Speaker 1: nobody will need, you know, the Rockefell or Foundation to
Speaker 1: explain to them why it's necessary, how it can be done.
Speaker 1: Can you see that happening? I certainly hope so. Because
Speaker 1: you know we cannot do this alone, we can light
Speaker 1: the spark. We can operate in the spaces that you
Speaker 1: foundations and philanthropies are particularly good at, which is early stage,
Speaker 1: high risk grant making or debt and equity investing. I
Speaker 1: think the big breakthrough will come when a large African
Speaker 1: country commits itself fully to integrate it electrific planning an
Speaker 1: investment and starts to really create a significant public private
Speaker 1: partnership that combines the best of sort of grid scale
Speaker 1: with off grid and I don't think we're that far
Speaker 1: away from that happening. Another tipping point is would be
Speaker 1: a major company like the ones I mentioned earlier, or
Speaker 1: you know in India, Tata Power or something like that,
Speaker 1: committing to a very large off grid business, because what
Speaker 1: that will do is also drive the prices down. You know,
Speaker 1: part of the price challenges also just scale. You know,
Speaker 1: the technologies out there. Solar panels have have pretty much
Speaker 1: come down to the level that you know they will,
Speaker 1: but there's other components that cost a lot of money
Speaker 1: that where we have to still squeeze fifteen, twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five percent out of the cost. If I can order
Speaker 1: ten thousand units of something, I can do that overnight.
Speaker 1: So there's a procurement site to this which just requires
Speaker 1: a scale player, and I think that will be a
Speaker 1: tipping point that I'm very confident we will see that,
Speaker 1: you know, within the next three to five years of
Speaker 1: probably soon. Actually lots of food for thought there, like
Speaker 1: how private companies are more nimble and more willing to
Speaker 1: take risks than governments, but that can make energy more expensive.
Speaker 1: And also this made me realize just how far we've come.
Speaker 1: That's a reason for hope right there. You know, as
Speaker 1: Ashvin says, just twenty years ago, there were four billion
Speaker 1: people without access to telecommunications and look at us now.
Speaker 1: I only feel alive when I'm on Instagram. I'm joking.
Speaker 1: Kind Of Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and
Speaker 1: the Rockefella Foundation, with production by Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's
Speaker 1: executive producer is Mia LaBelle, Engineering by Jason Gambrell and
Speaker 1: the fine folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by
Speaker 1: Pascal Wise. Special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Faine, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Carlie Miglio or Sheriff Vincent, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You can learn more about solving today's biggest problems at
Speaker 1: Rockefeller Foundation dot org, slash solvable. I'm Mave Higgins, Now
Speaker 1: go solve it.