Global South
A Locally Led Move Toward Microgrids in Puerto Rico
The start of this week, September 23, marks the average peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. After the devastating landfall of Hurricane Dorian in the northern Bahamas two weeks ago, the Caribbean community quickly moved to offer support. Relief began mobilizing out of New Providence and Andros Islands, which were…
Combating Climate Change: How Islands Can Go Further Together
This blog post was adapted from a keynote presentation given at the Pacific Power Association Annual Conference and was originally posted on Virgin.com. I was in Rarotonga, the capital of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, in 2010, after the island of Aitutaki—just a few kilometers south of…
How India Is Solving Its Cooling Challenge
Today, 40% of the world’s population resides within the hot tropical regions, where many of whom are exposed to potentially life-threatening temperatures for at least 20 days a year. Approximately 12,000 people die around the world annually due to heatwaves, and as our planet warms, these temperature surges are becoming more…
Rethinking Minigrid Design: Capturing Savings Through Capacity Utilization
Distributed minigrids are an increasingly attractive approach across sub-Saharan Africa for providing power to rural and underserved communities (as we explain here and here). As with any electricity system, the financial viability of a minigrid depends on capacity utilization, the extent to which the installed capacity of the…
The Puerto Rico Renewable Microgrid Toolkit: A Data-Driven Approach to Resilience
When the lights went out September 20, 2017, no one could have foreseen that it would take 130 days to restore power to seven out of ten people in Puerto Rico. Throughout the restoration process, Puerto Rico continued to experience sustained, widespread blackouts that left many in the dark for…