Electricity Without Wires | Simon Bransfield-Garth | TEDxAngliaRuskinUniversity

so which comes first technical innovation or economic development it's a question I've asked myself a few times what we normally think of is technical innovation comes out of developed economies and this can have a negative impact because now we have an ever-increasing gap between developed and underdeveloped economies and this turns out to be a really important issue for countries such as those in sub-saharan Africa some of you will recognize this this is the original netscape browser that came out in 1994 today it's something that we take for granted and the whole internet grew in the united states because the environment and the infrastructure around it existed at that time they had dial-up modems people had computers people had generally the knowledge of how to use these sorts of systems today many people under the age of 20 wouldn't even know what life is like without the internet and in fact some are now skipping over conventional computers to use this as their means to access modern services so instead of even seeing a desktop individuals will use their phone for entertainment for information for many many other services so where does that leave people like this this is a village in sub-saharan Africa there's no electricity here there's no water there's no sanitation there's no postal service so sadly individuals in houses like this are completely disconnected from the modern modern digital world or perhaps they're not where in the world would you expect the majority of mobile banking to be maybe in the United States maybe in Japan or actually the top six countries for mobile banking are in sub-saharan Africa these are not the wealthy countries of the world these are generally emerging economies so why is it that mobile banking is taking off in Africa where it hasn't yet taken off broadly in other parts of the world well just as we saw that infrastructure is essential for technology to develop actually infrastructure can also get in the way if you imagine how it is with electric cars electric cars are not fighting on a fair playing field petrol cars have had a hundred years to get out there and to become efficient petrol stations are around all over the place if we didn't have the petrol infrastructure electric cars would be much more developed than they currently are today the one piece of infrastructure that is more or less globally available is the mobile phone pretty much you can get a mobile phone signal anywhere in fact if you go into the center of Nairobi you can get a better 4G signal that you can get close to this university and so people have used that infrastructure to find novel and creative ways of addressing other problems banking is not widely available in many many rural areas in Africa so people have used their mobile phones as a replacement for banks you can send money around you can transfer you can pay your bills all over your mobile phone and this is an example of something we call reverse innovation it's where technology starts in emerging economies simply because the easy infrastructure isn't there and therefore the technology doesn't have to be absolutely perfect on day one it's still a whole lot better than what is currently available and then over time that technology gets better and better and eventually it finds its way back into the Western world there is a group of people that people call the magic 20% the magic 20% are about 20% of the world population that simultaneously have access to mobile phones which is roughly a 25 year old technology and also are still using candles or kerosene lights as the way of lighting their houses which frankly the Pharos would have understood this 20% is 1.2 billion people actually represent a very large number of consumers and those consumers have exactly the same desires as you or I they want to have a big house they will have a fine car they want to have good food on their table they want to be able to provide an education for their kids so how do we help countries in sub-saharan Africa leapfrog over all the technologies and move towards more modern technologies just in the way that countries in Africa have more or less given away with landlines and actually gone straight to mobile phones well in the conventional way of doing that you'd build lots of these this is a conventional coal-fired power station so you build a power station that generates a huge amount of electricity and that electricity is distributed across the grid into individual households and essentially every household has an infinite source of power you can draw as much power as you want out of your electricity sockets and you just pay for the electricity as you use it but that technology doesn't work well in sub-saharan Africa the average population density in Africa is about 5 households per square kilometer which means that on average you've got about 500 meters in between individual households and at the same time we've got a population which has got relatively low incomes so if you take the entire amount of money that those households can spend on energy they're never going to be able to pay even for the cost of the piece of wire that connects their house to the grid let alone the cost of the energy that they would otherwise be consuming so we need to think of another way of doing it this is another example of a power station now it may not look a whole lot like a power station to you but actually you've got an electronic appliance a calculator and up in the top right-hand corner you've got a very small power station it's a solar panel and that solar panel provides just enough energy to be able to drive that particular calculator so imagine if we took that idea and took it one step further of course we need to be able to do more than just be able to power calculators but how about if each household had its own private electricity source just enough power to be able to power the devices which are inside that household now it turns out that solar power is really rather good at this sort of stuff you'll all be familiar with solar panels in fields you'll be familiar with solar power solar panels on the roofs of big houses but actually solar panels scale really well a solar panel the size of a notebook is still perfectly good at certain functions so we end up in a world which looks a bit different to the one that we inhabit today where when you think of a device you not only have to think of the device itself but also the little power station that has to go with it in order to power that device and that changes the economics of devices so on the right hand side of this chart here you can see a kettle kettles are relatively inexpensive devices but actually they consume a huge amount of power and so the combination of the kettle and the power station needs its drive it is really quite expensive on the flip side you can see a television televisions modern televisions actually consume very little power and so the combination of the television and the very small power station it needs to drive in means that in many African homes they're now getting televisions before they get a kettle what's also interesting is at the power consumption of these devices is coming down so it's now actually cheaper to provide a modern television and provide the relatively small amount of power needed to drive that than it is to provide the additional amount of power that you need to drive an old television so historical wisdom would say that emerging economies actually get technology lost but what we're seeing here is actually emerging tech margin economies getting technology first because it's the characteristics of that new technology that makes it appropriate for those markets this is the sort of system that you might have it's a solar panel on the roof it's a box it's got some batteries inside it and people pay for it as they use the electricity rather like you would if you had a coin in a slot meter and then after a period of time the user owns that product and they no longer have to pay anymore for the power that comes out of it but it's a rather different model of energy because energy from the Sun is free so there's no additional cost to be able to use the energy coming out of this system just like with your broadband when you have an all-you-can-eat package there's no advantage to not using the Internet similarly here you can use the energy as much as you want up to the capacity of that system and so instead of people having to use kerosene lamps in order to do their homework in the evenings people have modern lights and that gets rid of the very dangerous kerosene lamps and the fumes that they create people can have rechargeable radios which means they no longer have to get rid of disposable batteries and all the environmentalist but impacts that come with them and wealthier people can have a television connected to a satellite providing 50 channels of television irrespective of whether you where you are whether you've got mains power whether you've got actually broadcast TV in your area and other people are using the technology in order to be able to light their homes or keep their businesses going people set up new businesses to do tailoring or hairdressing or other activities and many people use power to irrigate their farms more or less everybody in sub-saharan Africa is a smallholder farmer of one kind or another and typically if your crops are fed by rain alone that's a very inefficient use of the land by using irrigation of this type is possible to increase the income of a household by three times in one season so what we see here is a very different view of energy is what we might call a virtual grid there are no physical grid lines connecting the houses together but nevertheless each of the houses has its own power the mobile phone network is providing that connectivity that mobile grid if you like and the virtual grid could be rolled out on a very different timeline to conventional grids where the conventional grid you've got to get planning permission you've got to batten that buy the land rights you're going to raise the capital but with this sort of technology is possible to simply add power to each individual house rather like consumer electronics so this is kind of upside down innovation if you like this is bringing a new view of how energy gets distributed into individual households but it also changes the way that you think about devices these are some very efficient lights which are being developed for this sort of technology and typically these lights are 20 times as efficient as a standard tungsten light bulb that you might ordinarily have in a household similarly the televisions that we were looking at earlier a priori 10 times as efficient as the television that you would go and buy from a store just down the road so what it means is that people are able to invest in very low-power devices which in the West are of no great consequence but in Africa are critical because the power of energy is so much greater going forward we will all require those low-power energy devices and so the technology that's been developed originally in Africa will ultimately find its way into the West another example is the application of artificial intelligence and the big data to this technology with a standard solar home system your energy is coming from the Sun and so if the system is designed to be able to work when it's a sunny day if you have a cloudy day you find that the system will turn off sooner than it otherwise would and you get a problem which is a little bit like range anxiety as it's sometimes called in an electric car you don't actually know if the electric car is going to get you to your destination so people are using artificial intelligence not for autonomous beings or for self-driving cars but instead to optimize the power in these very entry-level consumer electronic devices and what it does is to share out that power across the lifetime of the device across the evening and it means that the customer is guaranteed to get power at any time they might want it that night whether it was a sunny day or whether it was a cloudy day similarly people are using big data to maintain these products as I said the households are very broadly distributed so the systems can self diagnose and can report problems and in fact very often the first time that anybody realizes that there's a problem with their system is that an engineer turns up on their door and to come along and fix it so how does this relate to the rest of us well in about 30 years time I predict that we're all going to have solar panels on we're all going to have batteries in our homes and actually the grid is going to be used as backup when that happens the power from your own private power station is free the power from the grid is not free and so you will have exactly the same drivers as these households in Africa to use energy as efficiently as you possibly can so in 30 years time I suspect that variations on the technology that is now first appearing in sub-saharan Africa will be appearing in houses all across the Western world so when you go home tonight you're likely to use one of these it's a switch it hasn't changed for 200 years Edison would be entirely familiar with this device and when you switch that light on this evening give a thought to your cousins in Africa who are sitting there and wondering how long it's going to be before you get modern technology just like they have thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 35,388

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Technology, Africa, Agriculture, AI, Alternative energy, Big problems, Business, Climate Change, Creativity, Data, Developing World, Electricity, Energy, Green, Innovation, Internet, Research, Science, Smartphone, Solar energy, Sustainability

Id: VlkJe_muIQU

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2017