![]() Okra Solar, which is helping set up microgrids in Cambodia, has found it’s important to find productive uses of electricity to increase income for people using a microgrid. Sometimes it’s easy for microgrid developers to become overly focused on the technology that goes into a microgrid, leaving other key issues inadequately addressed, according to Oscar Aitchison, power systems engineer for Okra Solar, an Australian company that makes software to manage microgrids. Searching for productive uses of electricity ![]() “It’s not just about the physical location, but it’s really about that underlying socioeconomic political structure, that utility structure that’s existing in that area,” Holdmann said. ![]() Microgrid planners need to ask how their project fits into the local environment, according to Holdmann. In helping communities across Alaska set up microgrids, Holdmann’s group has found it’s crucial that people believe they’re benefiting from the microgrids and are working with the developers and the utility to keep the systems operating. “One of our biggest lessons learned is that these projects, to some extent, need to be built organically from the ground up, and there really needs to be incentive structures built in.” “That’s really about aligning incentive structures with empowering local people to have a part of the project,” Holdmann said during the panel discussion. People are at the center of successful projectsĪ project’s long-term success centers on the interaction between a community and the technology, according to Gwen Holdmann, director of the Alaska Center for Energy at the University of Alaska. The challenges of bringing microgrids to the more than 800 million people who lack electricity include costs, technology and financing, according to panelists at a Microgrid 2021 session on “New Strategies to Hasten Microgrid Adoption in Remote Regions.”īut one of the underlying keys to success is understanding the needs of the communities the microgrids will serve, a panel of experts said at the conference.
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