Most of the time when I write about a positive disruptive technology it is because I find them doing a Google Search. And most of the time the companies are far away from my Toronto home base. But in the case of Clear Blue, it is right in my backyard which gives me the opportunity to have some face time with what I consider to be a company that understands the paradigm shifts happening in this century around power and connectivity.
Clear Blue builds smart off-grid power systems designed to light up villages and streets, power wireless base stations, and provide a reliable energy source to security cameras, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors and devices anywhere in the world. The technology comes in different flavours beginning with installations capable of delivering 25-watt base power and growing to the low-kilowatt base load range. Clear Blue has technology solutions that work with solar, wind and battery, managing the power and load, with the company remotely monitoring every site in real time. Its installations can be found in 34 countries around the globe with many of the sites in remote locales where off-grid low-watt power systems can make a significant difference in the lives of people who have never had access to reliable, continuous power and connectivity.
Their latest project is just one example of just how much a difference off-the-grid can make. Located in Delta State, Nigeria, Clear Blue has been involved in the deployment of a power and remote management system for 280 lights over 20 kilometers of rural road. Where a traditional utility provider would have had to build a hard-wired transmission infrastructure to reach the location, Clear Blue’s solution was dropped in, deployed smoothly, and provided results in less than a month.
The company’s modus operandi is to work with local telecommunications and infrastructure development companies at most global sites. In the case of the Delta State project, the local partner is Raeanna Nigeria Limited. Jay Ogor, the CEO of Raeanna, describes the challenges to deliver reliable power where needed with more than 80 million of Nigeria’s 186 million who have no access to electricity. He states: “Many previous projects in Nigeria have struggled to deliver reliable, high-quality power solutions…The success of Clear Blue’s Smart Off-Grid power technology on…previous collaboration made it an easy decision to utilize it for…street lighting in Delta State. Our plans and focus are to expand our rollout across Delta State and other regions of Nigeria, as it is key to the long-term betterment of Nigeria by bringing back a vibrant street life.”
This is not a unique story. A lack of rural electrification is a symptom of an overall deficit throughout much of Sub-saharan Africa. Solving the continent’s perennial power shortage problem is critical with more than half the people of Africa living without electricity. In a recent World Energy Outlook, it reported that number to be 26% of rural Sub-saharan Africa. The lack of reliable continuous electricity holds back the continent, and the economies of every one of its nations impacting commerce, education, health and more. As a result, Africa cannot fully take advantage of other transformative technologies that would raise all boats including reliable and continuous Internet access, adoption of smartphone technologies on mass, development of a thriving fintech and micropayment system independent of and in cooperation with banks, and more. That’s why dropping off-grid power systems into rural Africa and other remote locales around the world makes so much sense.
Clear Blue’s unique ability to remotely manage every installed site means implementation can be put in place quickly with continuous 24 x 7 monitoring. The Illumience cloud management system is Clear Blue’s secret sauce turning power system solutions into a subscription service. From its Toronto headquarters, Clear Blue manages and monitors the performance of every street light, telecommunications base station, security camera, and IoT device and sensor at all installation sites around the world. Every node is visually mapped and seen in real time. Automatic alarms get triggered by any light or other device not performing to the criteria established at the time of installation.
Tuerk described to me a recent installation site which required bringing the hardware into a remote cross-Andes Amazonian area of Peru. That meant transporting the equipment over mountainous terrain where no roads existed and dropping it into the upper Amazon jungle. Once it arrived the installation was straightforward and the system was able to provide base power for lighting and telecommunications while back in Toronto operators more than 6,000 kilometers away remotely monitored the site the moment it went live.
Tuerk describes how the various hardware and software management solutions the company offers is, in fact, turning power delivery and the associated technologies the company supports into a subscription service. And although the company remains relatively small, through its Developing World partners, it is seeing rapid growth in its customer base with demand for its unique value proposition continuing to grow.
This summer the company went public and today trades on Toronto’s TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV?CBLU), where it represents one of the first cleantech companies to be listed there. Clear Blue is truly representative of a rising number of positive disruptive technology companies bringing change to the 21st century, and helping to solve its many challenges. I promise to keep you informed about its progress in future postings.
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Demographics – As we stated in Part One on urban landscapes, more than half of us now live in cities.
Economics – The top 100 cities of the world produce nearly 25% of the wealth of the planet and that percentage will grow in the 21st century.
Revolution – The urban poor are the seeds of angry change. Look at the Arab Spring of 2011. Areas of unrest in the Developing World largely come from within cities — the slums of Cairo, the young and underemployed urban poor of Bahrain, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Tunis, Benghazi, Tripoli and Algiers. Urban slums are the seed beds of revolution.
The Challenges
Cities of the Developed World and Developing World face some of the same and some different challenges in the 21st century.
What are the common challenges?
Affordable Housing
New types of housing options are being tested in countries like Cuba and Venezuela. These innovative examples (see previous blog) represent exceptions and not the rule.
Makoko, Nigeria, is the rule, an urban slum consisting of shacks overlooking sewage-laden creeks and rivers on the edge of Lagos’ downtown. Nigeria’s urban population has grown from 7% in 1930 to more than 40% in 2012. The majority, almost 75% live in urban slums like Makoko. In 2004 the Government of Nigeria established a plan to provide for 8 million new homes to meet existing and future needs of its population, 5 million in cities and 3 million in rural areas. Nigeria has struggled throughout its post-colonial period in achieving any of its plans related to housing. Many projects originally designated for the urban poor have ended up in the hands of those who are far richer and who have used the houses built as income properties.
In addressing housing for the urban poor Nigeria is looking at a number of solutions. One involves using recycled plastic bottles as building material. DARE is the Development Association for Renewable Energies. Using concepts pioneered by Eco-Tec Soluciones Ambientales, Nigeria is training local construction companies to build housing that uses recycled plastic bottles as construction material.
Each Eco-Tec bottle house uses disposable plastic bottles and other “junk” turning waste into building materials. The houses are solar-powered and equipped with clean-fuel cooking stoves, wastewater filtration and composting systems, and water purification tanks.
With millions of plastic bottles thrown into rivers, streams, littering roadsides, and disposed of in landfill and garbage dumps every year in Nigeria, repurposing what is essentially a non-biodegradable material for construction makes sense.
Plastic bottles for housing is not unique to Nigeria. South Africa and other Sub-Saharan African countries, and Central and South American countries are building housing and even schools made from recycled plastic.
Education and Employment
The majority of urban poor, 70% are under the age of 30. They represent the majority of unemployed in the Developing World. They are the majority of inhabitants in the shanty towns of urban slums. They are the principal participants in the informal economy that dominates these urban areas.
In a 2004 United Nations Habitat study, using Nigeria again as an example, indicated that 31% of youth between the ages of 15 and 24 were unemployed and not in school. Country-wide unemployed young women not-in-school stood at 36% with the number 2% higher in urban slums. Comparable male statistics were 26% and 23%. In non-slum environments the out-of-school and unemployed numbers were much lower. About 50% of young men living in Nigerian slums in school were not working. The corresponding number for women was 35%.
Nigeria is a good example of the crisis facing the urban poor in much of the Developing World. So many of the young who are poor face underemployment or unemployment. So many leave school without completing a secondary education.
In unemployed and uneducated youth the demographics and economics are combining to create revolution. There is a historic correlation with revolution and political violence when young people represent a significant share of the total population of a country or region . The French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, the Russian Revolution in 1918, all were dominated by young people seeking employment, education and better living conditions. We see the elements that created Western revolutions in the Arab World in the Arab Spring of 2011. And we see it in civil unrest in Africa today. Poor countries experience civil conflicts when they have high percentages of young people lacking education and access to jobs.
In a paper published in June 2004, Richard Curtain, from the University of Canberra in Australia cited some statistics that showed, in countries with more than 40 per cent of the population between the ages of 15 and 29, the likelihood of civil unrest rises by a factor of 2.3. He further cited World Bank research indicating a greater occurrence of incidents of civil unrest in countries where 45% or less of young men had secondary school education.
So what can countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, like Nigeria, do to solve this problem of unemployment among youth? When we talk about the challenge of housing it is easy to see how the issue can be addressed. Find good designs, find materials, educate a workforce on the use of the materials, raise capital and build units. Unemployment and education programs are not too dissimilar.
The biggest obstacle to youth education and employment lies in the economy. Africa is undergoing its largest migration in history with the mass movement of people from rural to urban settings. When the population resided on farms, a family unit including children were all engaged in the business of subsistence agriculture. When the young with no training for jobs in an urban environment migrate to cities there is a lack of employment opportunity commensurate with the skills the new migrants have. It is hard to make a living as a fisherman in an urban setting.
As we discussed in our previous blog on the urban landscape, so much of the economy of urban slums is informal. Without education it is very difficult for young people to move out of informal, low wage or barter-paid employment within the urban slum. This perpetuates poverty.
Education represents the first step in breaking the poverty cycle. Educational programs oriented to entrepreneurship, that encourage young people to solve the environmental challenges they face, represent a way to increase employment or employability. So as in the case of housing, educators need to come up with good program ideas (design and materials), develop new curriculum that focuses on the skills of problem solving, invention, and that addresses the challenges of the 21st century through pilot projects that convert to permanent jobs, and provide both public and private investment in schools.
Young people should be enlisted to take part in coming up with solutions for their future. Projects like Sustainable Cities International, founded in Canada in 1993, engage government, industry, private citizens and youth in projects related to urban planning and design, waste, water, transportation, energy, disaster mitigation, poverty reduction, food, empowerment and governance.
We will continue addressing the challenges of the urban landscape listed above in our next installment of this blog.
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