Open Energy Access Summit

Clara Donadello, Vivien Barnier

Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad

Problem Statement: Approximately 1.2 billion people will need to gain access to electricity to achieve universal access by 2030, requiring a quick expansion of energy businesses and thousands of electricity connections. In parallel, there are numerous energy companies and other actors trying to solve the same problems at the same time without a proper exchange of know-how, technology, and standards. Significant efforts are spent on constantly re-developing the required baseline infrastructure and framework for reaching end customers. Very often, in Energy Access, the actors end up investing time and resources in ‘reinventing the wheel’ in a sector with already very scarce funds, which are still mainly coming from public and private donors. Most small and medium-sized domestic companies have to develop in-house tools or alternatively seek the use of proprietary commercial service providers, which implies significant additional costs. These costs often keep them from reaching an appropriate level of digitalization which in turn prevents them from being financially sustainable and profitable and hinders investments. If the energy company develops a solution in-house, it is kept secret for fear that making it open source will advantage its competitors.

Proposed Activities: We propose to organize an Open Energy Access Summit in Lagos, Nigeria, in June 2024. This will be a unique and enriching experience targeting this systematic shortcoming for achieving universal energy access alongside inclusion in a fair and equitable ecosystem. It focuses on the intersection of two critical areas: Open Source and Access to Energy, with all the implication of impact and complexity that the electrification approach brings. The event is located in Nigeria, a country heavily affected by a lack of electricity access and outages, but with a vital sector and community and demonstrated leadership in both Open Source and Electrification. The 2-day summit event will be directly followed by a 3-day hackathon-style meetup for interested and skilled participants. The summit will feature talks, live demonstrations, interactive workshops, community-building activities, and roundtable discussions on the topics around challenges and missing tools in the electrification space and potential Open Source, Open Access, and collaborative solutions for these challenges. The subsequent hackathon will engage in solving 2-3 pre-identified sector challenges during the summit and through voting and stakeholder hearings prior to the summit. It will be hands-on coding and prototyping and standards development for interoperability. During the whole event, we will, on the one side, demonstrate the proven role and power of open source and collaboration in accelerating universal energy access to practitioners from the sector and, on the other side, open doors and inspiration for the vital and brilliant African Open Source community to channel efforts to this area. This will be achieved by showcasing available and successful, and widely adopted Open Innovations and the identified needs for further features, improvements, and maintenance. Moderated roundtable discussions and brainstorming sessions will help identify both further shared challenges and potential solutions and collaborations. Wherever possible, identified solutions or additional features to existing solutions shall be addressed right at the summit and the subsequent hackathon. This will foster multi- and transdisciplinary collaboration between a variety of stakeholders, such as project developers, manufacturers, donors and funders, policymakers, and African and International Open Source Communities. We will organize this event with our partner World Resource Institute (WRI). Further partners include the African Open Source Community, The Access to Energy Institute, Linux Foundation Energy, and GOGLA. An event management expert based in Nigeria will be hired to ensure event marketing and advertising, venue selection/set-up, participants registration, and the smooth organization of the event.

Openness: Openness is the driving force behind everything EnAccess does. We are convinced that open source makes the energy access ecosystem more equitable and inclusive. All innovations supported by EnAccess are completely open source. They are available free of charge on our website and GitHub for adoption and customization. We constantly improve the ease-of-adoption. We seek to make the Summit inclusive and accessible to a variety of stakeholders. Nigeria, a regional hub, is very easily accessible within Africa. It provides a great location for the venue. Additionally, we will feature diverse, high-quality speakers, workshops, activities, and moderators. To ease the access, we will try to keep participation fees to a minimum and provide free and reduced tickets to participants with limited means. If we are able to fully sponsor the event, then we will make the whole event free for all attendees. Presentations, lessons learned, workshop materials, and other outputs will be openly available on various communications channels. The solutions and outputs created during the hackathon will be available on our website and on GitHub, which allows anyone to download, adopt or tweak free of charge and without any barriers to access. Moreover, since we strive to increase the adoption of open solutions, we will widely disseminate the solutions created during the hackathon and invite the energy access community to pilot, build and improve them.

Challenges: Organizing an event faces several challenges, such as logistics and ensuring high participation. One such challenge is making the event accessible, inclusive, and diverse as women, youth, and underrepresented stakeholders with limited resources from a variety of backgrounds can be structurally hindered to participate. We want to remove as many barriers as possible to ensure a diverse range of participants. Content-wise it will be challenging and important to find the right topics appealing to the crowd and to balance inputs and talks with actual live action and problem-solving. Moreover, just as we strive to attract a diverse range of participants, we also aim to invite an inclusive and diverse set of speakers and panelists. This can present quite a challenge in cultures where men are often overrepresented at similar events. Ensuring sustained results after the end of a conference presents another major challenge. Our Marketing team will widely spread the event’s content and results through multiple communications channels. We will create creative content linked to the event which we will regularly post after the event. One major advantage of physical events is the opportunity to network and make connections. Fostering a space for such connection can be challenging, especially with a large audience. To facilitate the building of collaborations, we will organize breakout rooms so individuals can connect on a specific shared subject, and give space for networking times.

Neglectedness: EnAccess will be able to dedicate part of its funds (provided by Mott Foundation) for the implementation of the event. These funds will mainly be used to cover in-house staff costs related to the event and a few other cost items related to the event. Our Keypartner World Resource Institute also provides parts of the resources. However, to ensure the realization of the project, we need other funds. E.g. those requested here would guarantee the possibility of implementing the project. We are actively looking for funding and reaching out to other funders, but the majority in our ecosystem do not fund summits or similar events. The overall event, by nature, requires multiple donors and partners, which is why we have partnered with WRI and are requesting these funds. We will however keep fundraising to further improve the quality and offerings of the event and push participation fees to a minimum.

Success: Success would be measured as follows: At least 100 attendants, with 90% from Sub-saharan Africa At least 30% women participating Inclusive panels of speakers, workshop leads moderators with near to equal representation of men and women At least one of the pre-identified challenge successfully solved through a collaborative hackathon 20% growth of Open Source in Energy Access community (started by EnAccess) Increased inquiry from energy sector practitioners for the adoption of available open innovations In the aftermath of the event at least 10 contributions to the Open Innovation library for Energy access within 2 months. At least one new collaboration to develop a new or upgrade an existing open innovation Collaboration Open Source Africa Community materialized and formalized Informal agreement on one new standard for interoperability in the Energy Access sector Additional success which cannot be measured, include: Collaborations and knowledge sharing between stakeholders enabled Open Source is recognized as a feasible and impactful solution for the energy access sector. Partnerships are built to find solutions to identified challenges in energy access. General increase of standardization within the sector is promoted.

Total Budget: $23,200

Affiliations: World Resource Institute. We are currently assessing partnerships with other organizations such as Open Source Africa Community, LF Energy, GOGLA, and Access to Energy Institute (A2EI)

LMIE Carveout: EnAccess team is a remote working team with two team members based in Sub Saharan Africa. The Summit is to be organized in Lagos, Nigeria (an LMIE) with the aim to mostly attract a Sub-Saharan Africa audience. EnAccess has partnerships with energy access practitioners in this region, while WRI has multiple African regional hubs. Any Open Source Outputs and the fostered collaboration are specifically targeted to the energy and electrification needs in LMIE in Africa and elsewhere. Those are the countries that have the largest lack of electrification while having a vital and dynamic scene of innovators and entrepreneurs to fill this gap. Those are the ones most benefiting from the Open Source solutions and community building being attendees or not.

Team Skills: EnAccess is composed of a CEO, Program Manager, two Software & Hardware Engineers, two Marketing experts, and technical advisors. We collaborate with a variety of actors in energy access in Europe and Africa, such as research institutes, private energy access companies, NGOs, developers, donors, etc. We are recognized as the thought leader of Open Source in the Energy Access space. In this function, we are regularly attending and presenting at sector conferences and events around Energy Access and also at events of the Maker Space and Open Source scene (e.g. LF Energy summits). As such, we are well aware of the trends to present an attractive program. The team has more than a decade of professional experience, in energy access (particularly mini-grids), programming, product development, and data science. In our functions, we have experience in liaising and working with small and large for-profits, non-profits, button-up initiatives, and governmental organizations. EnAccess is in constant bilateral exchange with open-source innovators and energy access sector stakeholders. Our partner WRI has extensive experience organizing international conferences and gatherings.

Submission Number: 172