Elon Musk won’t save us all.
I end up hearing about Elon Musk just about everyday.
Whether its from friends in Australia going crazy about his mega-battery factory or others saving up for a ride in SpaceX’s massive rocket, Hyperloop, or just a regular Tesla. I mean all credit, the boy’s busy.
As someone who founded an NGO seeking to support great stories about Climate Change around the world, you can see why I might be such a fan.
I’m even getting interested in his little AI crusade, and if you’ve seen Transcendence, I’m guessing you would be too.
On his own, Elon Musk perhaps sits alone atop his lithium battery tower as the individual who has made the greatest contribution towards a more sustainable energy transition.
But one thing I have come to realise through a few mis-spent years at the UN climate negotiations, is that the great single solution to the world’s energy crisis unfortunately doesn’t exist. Of course Musk knows this, and he is trying his incredible-best to offer a variety of solutions to a series of energy issues relating to energy generation and transportation.
But a recent trip into one of the more remote regions of Malaysia made this reality all the more clear.
Welcome to Terian. It’s beautiful right? Just check out the river.
The village sits alongside this beautiful river in a region known as the Crocker Range. Up until 2012, the only way in and out was a 6 hour hike through this glorious rainforest.
But you can imagine that a 6 hour walk isn’t the easiest journey for your morning coffee.
Nor is it an easy journey for our traditional electrical poles and wires that provide most of the world with electricity. Just imagine the cost of getting wires across these mountains
In a perfect world, the cost wouldn’t matter, and the community would be provided with a sustainable solution that utilises their natural environment.
Luckily for them, they do happen to have an amazing resource close by: steep running water, which some local innovators and resourceful villagers can utilise to create electricity.
The team at CREATE first said “let there be light” in Terian Village in 2004. But some landslides in 2013 took it off the grid. Now, thanks to the support of Seacology, they are planning on bringing it back again.
But for villagers in Terian, and the 1.2 billion others without access to electricity around the world, Elon Musk’s high-tech solutions aren’t going to help.
Now if Elon Musk and other world leaders in government and tech innovation don’t push transfer the energy sources of the rest of the world, people in Terian aren’t going to have a good time either.
However the often singular focus on these high-tech solutions takes important publicity away for those low-tech innovators supporting remote and urban poor communities around the world.
When the team at CREATE first introduced their Micro-hydro system in Terian, they had to walk most of the materials in. There was no road access.
They had to haul concrete in on their shoulders, and 1.5kms of pipe on the next trip in.
I hardly see Elon Musk and his ilk doing that anytime soon.
You might not even realise it, but when you consider that close to 1 in 6 people in the world currently live without something as simple as electricity, its a little hard to say they are so “isolated”.
And unfortunately the solutions they need require people to carry things, fix things with manual instruments and create low-tech solutions that community members can help install, manage and repair.
Even if you could 3d print the solution tomorrow, you still need a community to own, manage, care and repair their solution over time.
Without low-tech innovators pushing the boundaries of the tough manual work that goes into powering these communities, these 1.2 billion might be left off the guest list to Elon Musk’s next SpaceX solution.
