According to the SDGs,the World Bank and The International Renewable Energy Agency, one in seven people still lacks access to electricity, most notably in remote areas in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The good news is that about 150 million people gain access to electricity every year. According to the World Bank, “Notable progress has been made on energy access in recent years, with the number of people living without electricity dropping to roughly 840 million from one billion in 2016 and 1.2 billion in 2010.
Despite these successes in improving access to energy, about two- thirds of electricity still comes from non-renewable sources and energy contributes to about 60 percent of greenhouse gasses. In addition, more than three billion people still use polluting and unhealthy energy sources for cooking. The energy global grand challenge is closely linked to solving the other grand challenges, including environment, health, shelter, food, water, and prosperity.
Exponential technologies can play a critical role in solving the energy global grand challenge. Energy infrastructure built with exponential technologies—such as solar power infrastructure, internet of energy grids, batteries, windmills, and all of the machines that make these technologies—will follow exponential trends. And given that these technologies harness free energy sources—such as sunlight, wind, geothermal heat, and moving water—they have a distinct advantage over fossil fuels, which are limited by the scarcity of the fossil fuel resource even if technologies to extract the fossil fuels also follow Moore’s Law and the Law of Accelerating Returns. This is one of the reasons why we expect renewable energies to be so disruptive and successful in the future.
Solar technology in particular is making an impact in countries at all different economic levels. For example, MKOPA Solar.
Kenyan solar company, had connected more than 600,000 homes to affordable solar power by 2018. It is adding 500 more homes daily, creating 75 million hours of kerosene-free lighting per month. Similarly impactful is the India-based Barefoot College,which has trained more than 2,600 women in 96 countries in solar technology; the company provides 1.4 megawatts of electricity per year. In June 2019, Dutch company Lightyear launched the Lightyear One, a solar car with a 450-mile range that can be charged either through its solar panels or conventional methods.The company was originally founded at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2016 as part of a solar car challenge, and we are proud that the company’s founder, Lex Hoefslot, participated in SU’s 2017 Global Solutions Program (now Global Startup Program). Also in June 2019, Israeli company Eviation debuted its Alice plane, a nine-seater electric aircraft that can travel up to 650 miles at 10,000 feet at 276 miles per hour. It is expected to go into service in 2022 and only costs $8 to $12 to charge per 100 miles, compared to $400 in traditional jet fuel that a similar plane, like a turboprop Cessna Caravan, would require for 100 miles.
Through these early-stage innovations—which are emerging in parallel with developments in battery storage, more efficient management of energy grids through predictive artiﬁcial intelligence, and blockchain marketplaces that allow people to exchange energy, as well as the transformation of our logistics and transport systems into more internet-like paradigms—we can see the emergence of a powerful new renewable energy sector.
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