In 2021, the project is well underway and an exciting development in our activities is the inclusion of two low-consumption direct current (DC) freezer/fridges into our solar minigrid offer to the community we are working with. Zonke Energy is taking the lead on exploring the technical, financial and community parameters we need to work with in order to offer refrigeration services additional to our solar minigrid offer.
The provision of refrigeration is really important: the lack of energy for refrigeration in the Qandu Qandu informal settlement, Cape Town has been identified as one of the major concerns of the residents. The residents of Qandu Qandu have explained to us that the mostly ‘illegal’ electricity that they access is insufficient to make use of fridges. The consequence is that no perishable groceries can be kept in the home, and that residents have to shop more frequently, or have to abstain from any fresh groceries. These circumstances add substantially to the cost of living of the residents in Qandu Qandu, and decrease their wellbeing. The provision of refrigeration to members of the community who are minigrid clients has therefore been identified as a priority. This doesn’t come without its own challenges, financial and technical. The gap between affordability and the cost of off-grid refrigeration is the major obstacle in providing clients with refrigeration. With this in mind, Zonke Energy are presently testing a range of alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC) fridges in their laboratory and in clients’ households. The energy consumption of the DC fridges that the project aims to use is, we are told, 35% lower than the consumption of the fridges that are currently available on the market in South Africa. We therefore believe that the addition of fridge availability to the minigrid will add substantially to the relevance of our research into off-grid refrigeration. By Capritto Federico, University of ExeterIt is a pleasure to announce that two of our project team members, Prof. Federico Caprotti (University of Exeter) and Dr. Jiska de Groot (University of Cape Town) were awarded the Chair’s Prize at the November 2020 Newton Prize awards ceremony. See the UKRI press release here.
The Chair’s Prize was awarded on the basis of Federico and Jiska’s previous collaborative work, in 2016-19, on an ESRC-NRF project on urban energy transformations. However, the £500K prize will be spent on a highly innovative project aiming to link our Energy4Wellbeing work on solar microgrids in informal settlements, to ways of addressing the need for refrigeration in the communities we work with. To that end, we will be working closely with Zonke Energy as our private sector partners with deep experience in solar microgrid development, installation and operation in the community. Zonke Energy will lead on the technical aspects of developing refrigeration capacity and business models. The result of all this is the new, UMBANE project, which will kick off in April 2021. It will see an expansion of our work in Quando Quando, and will also involve the use of refrigeration appliances as small-scale businesses for local entrepreneurs. This is an exciting development, since the project team are keenly aware that it isn’t just electricity that is a key need to be addressed in off-grid spaces, but also a range of other needs that have, so far, largely been ignored in the development and innovation literature. Refrigeration is one of these (data is another), and we are excited to be engaging in this work. |
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