Global South
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…
Minigrids in the Money
In sub-Saharan Africa, hundreds of millions of people (about 65 percent of the population) live in communities that lack access to electricity. As a key enabler of economic development, the lack of energy access stymies broader efforts to grow local wealth and improve quality of life. Understandably, to address this…
Capturing India’s Mobility Opportunity: RMI’s Urban Mobility Lab
Walking on the Tilak Road in Pune, one of the busiest streets in the ninth-largest metropolis of India, we were engulfed by diesel exhaust. An otherwise beautiful day was clouded by thick smoke from the tailpipe of a city bus, adding to the already polluted air. Young children crossed the…