What do Microgrids Need?
A lot of people wonder what a microgrid is. It’s not big enough to be THE GRID, attached to large generation projects. And it’s more than rooftop home solar systems and solar lanterns.
Think of how rural communities might one day be able to power their own businesses without being connected to the central grid. Maybe it involves a windmill, some solar panels, and even a back-up generator? Or maybe instead of a generator, it uses some good, innovative batteries that can store power at a commercial level. Microgrids to date have found themselves in a financial nether land, with investors running to large grid-scale projects and smaller home systems. We want to help change that.
Microgrids fill a need in areas that are too far from cities to reasonably transmit THE GRID’s power, but with too much power demand to look to solar lanterns and rooftop solar systems as the solution.
To address this problem, a new dedicated micro-grid investment facility was launched at the Sustainable Energy For All (SE4All) Forum last month. Called the Microgrid Investment Accelerator (MIA), this consortium of partners will work to unlock private capital for energy access, mobilizing $50 million of financing, via public-private partnerships, to bring modern energy services to under-served parts of East Africa, India and Indonesia by 2020. That’s good for communities where access to clean energy matters most. MIA is a first-of-its-kind energy access financing facility designed to address these challenges.
Power Africa is pleased to be an advisor to this fund, along with other partners. Facebook, Microsoft and venture capitalists at Allotrope Partners are among the key players. The South African retail chain Woolworths joined the EP100 campaign aimed at doubling energy productivity by 2020. The Global Environment Facility confirmed its support for SEforAll’s Industrial Energy Efficiency Accelerator, led by UNIDO and the Carbon Trust. Together, we’re advancing micro-grids across the continent.
To learn more about MIA, check out www.microgridinvest.org. There, you can find the Market Report, MIA Overview and other background information on the MIA facility.
