SROGS conference took place at University College London (UCL) on December 9th and 10th. Presenters included academics, PhD students, private sector representatives, policy makers, practitioners, physicists and engineers, which provided a solid overview of the sector and the challenges it is and has been facing since it came to prominence in 1990s. Report by a coorganizer Iwona Bisaga, University College London.
It was jointly organised by Iwona Bisaga from the Centre for Urban Sustainability and Resilience (USAR) within the Civil, Environemntal and Geomatic Engineering department at UCL, and Declan Murray from the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. This two day event saw speakers and attendees from a diverse range of disciplines get together to dicuss a variety of themes around off-grid solar solutions for energy access in Sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Asia and Latin America.
The series of presentations and breakout group discussions focused on existing business models and technology designs, linking them to the user experience and the ways in which users and customers are included in (or excluded from) those processes, and how that could be changed to better reflect their needs and aspirations throughout the whole value chain: from product design to after-sales services and dealing with solar waste. Socio-economic impacts and what they mean for the users, including women and marginalised communities as particularly vulnerable groups, were given a lot of attention, though it quickly became clear that there still remains a lot to be done in order to fully understand what actual impacts off-grid solar has on the users, and how exactly it is utilised within the households. And what about financing? It is frequently one of the biggest hurdles to the scale up of off-grid solar.
