Building a scalable business model for Town-sized, solarized Smart Grids

by Allison Archambault

This is an excerpt from a Microgrid News article. Read the full article here. 

"The point of what we're doing is to prove out a viable business model that can be scaled and replicated throughout Haiti and the rest of world," says Allison Archambault, President of EarthSpark. That model is: deliver affordable, reliable energy services to homes and businesses in small towns with town-sized, solarized smart grids. We are optimizing for lowest levelized cost of electricity - when we do that, the generation is heavily renewable. Obviously these are site specific, but in many of the towns we envision for next steps, solar is a fantastic resource."

EarthSpark has been running the grid project in Les Anglais since November 2012. The organization launched Haiti's first prepaid microgrid with just fourteen customers and has now expanded it to fifty-four - all of whom are now using second generation smart meters which are now being further developed by SparkMeter, a technology company that EarthSpark recently spun off to specifically focus on smart meter hardware and software.

"We were looking for pre-paid meters with a low price point and a high degree of functionality," Archambault says. "We wanted to do things like change load limiting and remote connect / disconnect. There was nothing on the market that met our needs, so we developed our own." The grant received by EarthSpark will allow them to expand the project to approximately 400 customers, and to solarize the grid. 

"Right now the microgrid in Les Anglais is simply using diesel, which was never the long term plan," Archambault adds. "It was a simple way to get started, as we were collaborating with the local telecom company that was already using diesel for their communications tower." 

"Once the viability of the business model is proven, it should be able to be replicated elsewhere. Looking forward, we would not do a phased approach - we would go in and do a community / load assessment, alongside the government and local leaders, and design a town-sized energy system from the beginning." 

EarthSpark's notable innovation is its effort to pair residential and commercial loads in a viable business model through prepaid smart meters, seeking to provide demand management on a town-size scale in a way that makes the whole grid more efficient. After the Les Anglais project has proven out the business model, Archambault sees the integrated town-scale approach as replicable and attractive to investors.

"Basically, we are taking one hundred years of people's experience managing power systems -- the lessons learned and the technology available now - and building the best possible system in these developing areas," she adds. "There is no incumbent infrastructure where we're building these grids. We're leapfrogging to the next generation, similar to what mobile phone operators did in these kinds of countries." 

This is an excerpt from a Microgrid News article. Read the full article here. 

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