Why For-Profit Clean Power Products In the Developing World Matter

After doing research on startups making clean power products for the developing world over the past few weeks, I’ve come to realize that there’s generally two types of power goods being created for “the next billion” consumers in regions like rural India or sub-saharan Africa: novelty power goods and power products that consumers in the developing world will pay for and value. While I appreciate the “cool value” of some of the novelty clean power goods coming out of design firms and universities these days, I think there needs to be a fundamental shift towards tackling power products that the emerging consumer in the developing world will actually spend money on because they’re fulfilling real needs at the right price.

I started thinking about the idea after reading about EGG-Energy’s experiences in selling a battery subscription service in Tanzania. On a post on EGG-Energy’s Facebook page, they say: “[T]hese days making money in the developing world is often seen as a point of pride. The idea is that if you are giving something away – whether it’s bed-nets or condoms or even drugs – there is always the worry that your organization might be simply flooding the countryside with goods that are either useless or not valued by their intended beneficiaries.”

While EGG-Energy’s article was looking deeper into how being a for-profit in the developing world isn’t always a magic bullet, the idea of using capitalism to determine if a product has value in the developing world often seems to be an under-utilized approach when it comes to clean power. For example, this morning I read about a group of students that created a product called sOccket, which is in essence a soccer ball that generates and stores electricity during game play, and uses an inductive coil mechanism similar to the technology found in shake-to-charge flashlights.

No doubt sOccket will be the next big thing for the green blogosphere to point to as “Using Soccer to Supplant Kerosene?” as the New York Times Green Inc. blog headline puts it. I think the realities of such a product will be quite different than the article explains it — inductive coil mechanism products have been failing to in the mainstream for years, most recently with the firesale of M2E Energy, which used an enhanced version of that technology for mobile phones and vehicles.

Green Inc says: “Using a ‘buy one-give one’ model, the sOccket team hopes to sell the ball in Western markets, as a high-end tech gadget, then use the profits to distribute the balls at little or no cost in poor countries.” That’s about as close to the definition of a novelty power product as you can get — the developing world consumer is basically given the product, subsidized by the developed world.

It’s a cool idea, but clearly not a game-changer when it comes to clean power and the developing world. I’m more interested in startups like Duron, which sells a solar, LED, cell phone and radio charging products, and has been finding a market for “thousands” of its goods a month, Duron President John Howard recently told me. Duron might not be as fun to kick around as the sOccket, but it’s going to change a lot more lives.

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