Presentation before the jury of the team "Team Model Village", from Nigeria
Seventeen projects to guarantee universal access to energy
Around 50 participants –students and engineering professionals-, organized in 17 teams, from Germany, Holland, France, Scotland, Italy, Spain, Scotland, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana, Algeria, Burkina Faso and Senegal, are competing today on the Seville Campus of Loyola University to become winners of the Europe-Africa phase of the Empower a Billion Lives event.
This initiative, organized by the Institute on Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE), in collaboration with the Institute of Science and Technology of Loyola University (LOYOLATECH), starts with the objective of evaluating innovative proposals in order to find accessible solutions to guarantee universal access to energy, a problem that affects 13% of the world population.
The projects
The proposals presented - which were chosen in a previous round in which around 400 were presented - are very diverse and propose different solutions. For example, E-Faitou, consisting of mobile vehicles capable of supplying energy and portable refrigeration services in areas where large companies rule out investment in the electricity grid due to the difficulty of recovering the investment. On the other hand, projects like Eclipse seek to respond to some of the most basic needs, with a clean kitchen system that prevents poisoning and lung diseases that are very frequent in countries like Senegal or Ethiopia derived from inhaling the pollutants released from cooking in primitive wood stoves, while providing an energy solution for people without connection to the electricity grid.
Likewise, the other projects presented are “Vitalite”, from Senegal; "Baobab +", from France; "Team Model Village" and "Darway Coast" from Nigeria; “Smart Grids Lab”, from Scotland; "Candid Solar Systems", from Ghana; “DC Opportunities R&D”, from Holland; “Sigu1”, from Ivory Coast; “Solaris Offgrid”, from Spain; "SolarWorx" and "Hospital Solar Project in Ghana", from Germany; “Jua Energy”, from Algeria; "Sahelia Solar" from Burkina Faso; and "Comitato di Collegamento di Cattolici per una civilita dell amore", from Italy.
For Pedro Rodríguez, director of the Loyola Institute of Science and Technology and member of the jury, "one of the most important questions we evaluate is the possibility of real application: that the project could be executable outside a laboratory." Thus, new forms of management stand out "from a technical point of view, but also in terms of the originality of business forms, such as Pay as you go technology", especially installed in regions such as Tanzania and consisting of segmented payment and accessible by access to electricity for populations that survive with a capital of just two dollars a day.
Session of January 23
Tomorrow, Wednesday, January 23, Empower a Billion Lives will continue at the Carriage Museum with the celebration of different panels and workshops, among which the Secretary of State for Energy, José Domínguez Abascal; Antonio Soria, from the JRC of the European Commission, and the representative of the International Association of Jesuit Universities (IAJU) in Africa, François P. Kabore SJ., As well as experts from ABB, Schneider Electric, Enel, MIT, and Wellness Telecom.
Empower a Billion Lives will be closed by the Mayor of Seville, Juan Espadas at 18:00.
JANUARY 22, 2019
