At ASU, we don’t believe in playing small ball. That’s why the Center for Energy & Society has worked for the past three years to help build a global alliance to eradicate extreme poverty through grassroots energy innovation.
Our partners in this endeavor include some amazing groups:
- Funded by the Global Consortium for Sustainability Outcomes, we’ve built the Eradicating Poverty through Energy Innovation (EPEI) network, a partnership with local solar and renewable energy project developers across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We’re helping these small businesses learn to collaborate better with their customers so that their projects deliver more social impact, their business model works better, and they’re better candidates for government, bank, and philanthropic investors.
- The EPEI Network has now hosted two major conferences, one in Tempe, AZ, and one with the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies in Dehradun, India, that have brought together over 250 grassroots organizations, local leaders, and energy innovators to rethink how we design energy solutions for low-income communities. Our next target: COP 26 in Scotland at the end of 2021.
- The Community Appropriate Sustainable Energy Security project at the University of Saskatchewan is using our ideas about the social value of energy to build innovative new grassroots energy enterprises across the Canadian north in partnership with First Nation Communities.
- Working with the Associação Dos Trabalhadores Agroextrativistas Da Ilha Das Cinzas (ATAIC), a forest community organization in Brazil, we helped secure funding for an innovative solar project from the Honnold Foundation.
- Working with academic partners in the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and the Affordable Energy for Humanity Initiative at the University of Waterloo, we’ve pioneered new methods and tools for user-centered energy innovation that cultivates capabilities for social and economic value creation in communities that lack energy access.