Counting the Impacts in the Solar Off Grid Sector

Abstract

Solar off grid entrepreneurs dream of doing their meaningful share towards ending global energy poverty by delivering clean, reliable, and sustainable electricity to the millions of people who live with no or only partial connection to the grid.At the same time, and in line with the pro-business rhetoric of philanthrocapitalist foundations, the selling of solar power to people living 'off' or 'under' the grid also represents an opportunity to pursue the untapped commercial value of new and expanding markets in Africa and Asia. 1 Initially, it was a sector defined by the mass production and marketing of simple solar lanterns that came to represent a 'minimal technology for living.' 2 The solar lanterns came to serve, as Cross 3 puts it, "as a benchmark of whether or not people have access to the most basic level of clean, efficient energy deemed necessary for human life."Today, the sector has grown to incorporate the sale of a wide array of other ingenious other solar-powered devices and systems, of different size and scale.In turn, lanterns, as the once iconic product, have largely come to be replaced by so-called solar home systems-sufficient, in the smaller formats, to power lights, mobile phone chargers, and in many cases a radio.The larger solar home systems provide enough energy to also power TVs, fans, and refrigerators.It is the latter kind of solar off grid products that this chapter will engage with.More specifically, my concern is here with the 'impact metrics' that are fashioned in 1 Eva Riedke, "A solar off-grid software: The making of infrastructures, markets and consumers 'beyond energy,'" in Digitisation and Low-Carbon Energy Transition, ed.Siddharth Sareen and Katja Müller (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023): 31-52; Eva Riedke and Catherine Adelmann, "The good payers: Exploring notions of ownership in the sale of pay-as-you-go solar home systems," Energy Research & Social Science 92, no.102773 (2022): 1-8; Jamie Cross, "The Solar Good: Energy Ethics in Poor Markets," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25, no.S1 (2019): 47-66; Jamie Cross, "Capturing Crisis: Solar Power and Humanitarian Energy Markets in Africa," The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 38, no. 2 (2020): 105-124; Tom Neumark, "Leapfrogging the Grid: Off-grid Solar, Self-reliance and the Market in Tanzania," Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale 30, no. 2 (2022): 140-160. 2 Peter Redfield, "Bioexpectations: Life Technologies as Humanitarian Goods," Public Culture 24, no. 1 (2012): 157-184.3 Jamie Cross, "Solar Basics," Limn.Issue 9 (2018), https://limn.

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