Microgrid company advances economic development in Rwanda
Xpower, founded by engineering graduates from Imperial college London, has grown into one of the largest providers of rural electricity in Rwanda. Now, with help from the Colorado State University Energy Institute, the company is expanding to provide greater access to clean, affordable energy and better drive economic development.
Xpower operates under the name MeshPower in Rwanda, where it uses microgrids — essentially small-scale electric systems that run on a combination of solar power and battery storage — to bring power to remote villages. The challenge is to generate power that meets the needs of both business customers and low-income households, and Xpower has come up with an innovative solution.
“Xpower’s unique approach is to use hybrid AC/DC grids to cater to all of our customers,” said Richard Mori, co-founder of Xpower. “We can efficiently supply homes with low-voltage power, while business can be served with AC connections. It is a win-win solution and I believe our approach and technology is unique in the industry.”
AC, or alternating current, has long been the standard for national grids around the world and is useful for powering motors like those in a refrigerators, sewing machine and grain mills, but is expensive to generate and distribute to households. At the same time, most electronic devices like laptops and TVs require a different type of low-voltage electricity — direct current or DC. DC power can supply safe, cheap, low-voltage power to households, but it can’t easily power productive use machinery.
Once Xpower has set up a community with a low-cost DC system, they return to add an AC system that can provide power for larger business needs and productive uses, if the demand is there.
Gitaraga, Rwanda, is one such village that has a combination AC/DC system in place to bring power to local homes and to power commercial businesses like haircutters, sewing shops, and bars with refrigerators. This provides some advantages over the national grid systems because MeshPower is able to meet customer needs directly.
“We had no power here. Since MeshPower came everything changed. Now, I can use power to cut hair and listen to the radio,” said Martin Twagirimana, who is the village leader of Gitaraga and owner of a hair salon.
Twagirimana started his hair salon in 2002 and uses power for his tools of the trade like razors, flat irons and curling irons. Previously he tried to power his hair salon with batteries and solar, but he could never get enough power for his work. MeshPower’s AC system now provides enough power for his business to operate.
“Now, everyone can charge phones, see the street lights every night and listen to the radio,” he said. “The city here is really nice because they have what they need. I am very excited to see my business going good.”
In this community, access to power has transformed the way commerce is done and it has allowed more money to stay in Gitaraga itself as local entrepreneurs are now able to meet local needs.
“Our power is more advantageous because there is control and reliability, and we don’t have power cuts,” said Ivan Asiimwe, technical consultant at MeshPower. “One cool thing about MeshPower is that we aren’t just providing services, we also engineer the products according to the customer needs. If they say I am going to plug in a flat iron, we add that in by changing the design aspect of the connection. There is flexibility. We are actually doing better than the national grid in terms of providing better services.”
MeshPower also uses an AC/DC combination microgrid at Entusi Retreat Center on Lake Bunyonyi in Kabale, Uganda. The DC part of the system supplies lighting to guest tents, while the AC part of the system provides power to large appliances. The entire system is powered by solar panels.
The collaboration between CSU and MeshPower exemplifies how innovation and entrepreneurship have real on-the-ground impact that allows communities to transform and grow. MeshPower is the backbone of those efforts with more than 70 grids in Rwanda — with more coming online in the next year — to help the country meet its stated goal of fully electrifying by 2024.
That goal is more than just a number, it is an indicator of how important the people of Rwanda believe electricity is to their success, says Ivan. It is also why Colorado State University is proud to work with nimble, smart startup companies like Xpower that are able to deliver solutions to energy challenges.
“I think from a global interest we want to do several things. One of those is to grow the economy. Energy access worldwide is necessary to grow the economy. But we need to do that in a way that doesn’t increase our greenhouse gas footprint and cause even more climate change,” said Dan Zimmerle, senior research associate at the CSU Energy Institute and advisor to Xpower. “The second thing is we need to help everybody achieve some standard of living. If we don’t do that, then we open up other forces, political and social, that create problems that are much more difficult to deal with than electrification.”
