ME SOLshare Ltd.

Dr. Sebastian Groh is the founder and CEO of ME SOLshare Ltd.,  implementing innovative peer-to-peer solutions to bring affordable solar energy to Bangladesh. Dr. Groh's venture stems from his passion to democratize the world's energy future. His journey in this space first began as a PhD student at Aalborg University at the Berlin Institute of Technology, where his thesis focused on energy poverty, and the role of energy in the economic development process, and technical innovations. He then published a book and multiple journals on the topic of decentralized electrification, and since 2015, has led SOLshare as its CEO. In addition to this, Sebastian is an associate professor at BRAC University’s Business School. Originally from Germany, Sebastian holds a Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD in economics, and received executive training on strategic leadership in microfinance from Harvard Business School. He is also a Stanford ignite fellow in entrepreneurship and innovation. 

SOLshare created a revolutionary new approach to bring affordable solar electricity to the energy poor in remote, rural off-grid communities of Bangladesh. Building upon the success of an installation base of over five million solar home systems, that generate an excess amount of energy worth US$ 1 billion per year that cannot be stored, we are pioneering a micro-energy transition model 3.0, by interconnecting solar home systems into smart peer-to-peer micro-grids, monetizing (excess) solar energy along the value chain with mobile money in real time and empowering rural communities to earn a direct income from the sun. SOLshare is propelling the systemic change of how people use and move electrons around the globe in the spirit of the new energy world fueled by the 5 D's: Decarbonization, Decentralization, Democratization, Disruption & Digitization. SOLshare's solutions could potentially change the face of utilities globally, and leapfrogs rural communities today.

According to the World Bank, off-grid solar products currently service over 360 million people globally. However, while this number seems significant, the current reach is estimated to only be 17% of the market potential. Off-grid solar products, particularly solar home systems (“SHS”), serve an important role in the frontier markets by empowering the ‘next billion’, who currently lack electricity or live with unreliable or insufficient electricity service. In so doing, SHS’ complement grid-based power distribution in frontier economies, by serving as a platform for: a) effective energy transition (from fossil fuels to renewables), b) affordable, reliable and scalable rural electricity supply, and c) carbon neutrality.  

Despite Bangladesh being a global market leader in SHS installations with over five million systems serving over 25 million people, widespread energy poverty continues to plague the nation, where nearly 60 million people still lack access to or have unreliable access to electricity, due to inadequate distribution networks. To address this gap, SOLshare created the world’s first peer-to-peer energy exchange network of rural households and microbusinesses with rooftop solar home systems, which enabled a more efficient distribution of electricity across rural communities.

SOLshare is propelling the systemic change of how people use and move electrons around the globe in the spirit of the new energy world fueled by the 5 D's: Decarbonization, Decentralization, Democratization, Disruption & Digitization. Our energy exchange platform leverages existing SHS which are interconnected by placing a SOLbox (our smart bi-directional meter) in every household and microbusiness within the microgrid with and without a SHS. Our innovative model (referred to as the ‘prosumer’ model), allows certain households to become both a producer and a consumer of electricity generated by their SHS. In summary, one household can sell excess power into the microgrid, while neighboring households or microbusinesses can buy it in small increments using mobile credits. 

The SOLbox is an IoT device that allows prosumers to
automatically sell excess energy when storage is full and buy when more energy is required. The ability to sell energy sets a very strong incentive for energy efficiency measures, such as behavioral change for usage and equipment purchasing. Our data analytics is fed realtime information through Wi-Fi Towers set up within each grid for remote grid management and to improve the allocation of scarce electrons in our grids increasing the utilization factor significantly.

SOLshare operates in the energy access market for rural off-grid communities. The people we serve are those suffering from energy poverty. Being such an important commodity, we know that energy can make a vast difference in a people’s lives. Our end-users fall into three categories:

1. Consumers - Villagers that do not have a system of their own and are pure off-takers.

2. Prosumers - Villagers with a solar home systems (SHS) that at times need more power, other times less. They can be a net-producer or consumer depending on their usage pattern. 

3. Producers - Villagers that turn out to be solar entrepreneurs who obtain solar generation and storage assets for the purpose of selling. 

By providing a market-based solution to participants in the peer-to-peer microgrid, there are financial incentives to make a more efficient use of the energy resources. Targeting the remote population of the river islands of Bangladesh, where many rely on fossil fuels for limited economic and subsistence activities, SOLshare provides affordable access to clean decentralized energy, substituting the traditional local sources of energy (fuelwood, diesel generators, kerosene) and improves the existing energy infrastructure (SHS) through retrofitting with SOLshare's technology. 

As we aim to elevate affordable and clean energy access to the communities most vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change we are inspired. They adopted renewable energy in a decentralized mode the quickest and largest in terms of the number of installations in the world. Everyday they teach us the true meaning of energy efficiency and a sharing economy. Our business model is designed so that only if the community prospers, we also gain. Unless our platform leads to sustainable and human development, trade volume will remain low, and SOLshare will not benefit and vice versa. 

I was on track to become an investment banker. I was majoring in Economics  and worked semester breaks on the trading floor in Frankfurt. One day there was an event at my university labeled Doing Business with the Poor. The notion of doing business with the poor was extremely provocative back then. My inspiration was the world record in Bangladesh. While Germany was celebrated for its Energiewende, having 2.5 million private households with roof-top solar installations, Bangladesh, already had over 5 million solar home systems. I wanted to know more, and came here to study what had happened. It became clear to me that access to electricity is critical for remote villages, but it is the flexibility & profitability of energy usage that provides the key ingredient for innovation and change leading to sustainable development. In 2013, I became a Stanford Ignite Fellow from Stanford's Graduate School of Business as part of my PhD on the role of energy in development processes. I never wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I was determined to get into Stanford and came up with a business idea and pretended to be an entrepreneur. That’s how SOLshare was born 7 years ago.

At the heart of SOLshare, and in everything we do, is the passion/drive to make use of existing resources, and focus on our comparative advantage. This is a lesson I learnt early on during my time at Stanford. Focus on your comparative advantage and leave out all the other distractions. So this is what we are doing. The core problem we are tackling is that of energy poverty. Around the globe there are around 2.3bn people that have either poor or no access to electricity. This concerns every 3rd person on our planet. Bangladesh achieved something truly amazing, they provided a lot of those people with what is called a solar home system. A country which is most vulnerable to climate change, has over 25M people who have solar as their primary energy source. They have been showing us the way all along. This is what brought me to Bangladesh in the first place, first as a researcher and then as a social entrepreneur. 

SOLshare built the world’s first solar P2P microgrid, being the first mover has had its advantages and disadvantages, sometimes forcing us to learn difficult lessons along the way. Throughout this journey that we continue we are paving the path for others to learn from our mistakes all while we refine our skills, our teams and our models to give our best back to the communities that we serve. 

Our teams include R&D, Hardware and Firmware which is all a part of designing and testing our tech. Production is what turns the vision into reality. The data team manages the backend with the constant inflow of data from the grids while data analytics turns the info into visualizations. The product team ensures Q&A protocols and timelines are met. Field and Operations ensures everything is implemented properly as well as support and maintenance while also having a customer service hotline. Of course we also have business, finance, marketing, people & culture (HR is a word we don't like), fundraising and project management to make sure the rest of the organization is running smoothly.   

On the national scale and international there is no solution that uniquely does exactly what SOLshare does, which is allows our end users to earn a direct income from the sun by selling the excess power on their SHS and allowing them to buy more energy when they need it all within a solar P2P microgrid. This is why we should be allowed to continue our work.

Our biggest challenge is expansion of the national grid. As much we understand that the national goal is to become 100% electrified, we had to take a long hard look at our work and understand what would happen if we could not continue. Even though the Sustainable and Renewable Energy Development Authority (SREDA) did identify over a 100 villages that the grid would not be able to reach to be electrified through renewable solutions. This was not sufficient. This is where the idea for a point of common coupling (PCC) came about. Instead of removing over 5 million solar panels and batteries (storage) that could be an invaluable resource we could put it all to use. If we bundled our interconnected, peer-to-peer microgrids and connected them to the national grid through a PCC it could pave the way for a new global standard for electricity distribution. We decided to start talking to all the government energy stakeholders to pursue a Community Power Purchase Agreements as a viable option towards a resilient and sustainable recovery of C-19, the development of national utilities whilst providing decentralized renewable energy prosumers with a financial incentive for electricity usage and sharing at the BoP. 

In early 2017, SOLshare came up with a new product addressing a dire need in the market. Millions of credit-financed SHSs were in the market, but repayment rates started to plummet and the threat of taking away the asset in case of default, lost its credibility. SOLshare came up with a low-cost device (USD10) that could be installed in the field on existing SHS to turn them from post-paid into prepaid. In the first month alone we sold 2,500 SOLcontrols. We were the only company in the country with such device. While installation numbers were around 40,000 SHS per month, a new social security program was launched which made SHSs free of cost. A smart payment solution isn't needed for a free product. This was devastating as we had 1.5 years of R&D behind us before launching the product and another USD100K worth of stock at hand. A daunting task to maneuver for a young start-up and a potential breaking point. After a month of sulking and complaining, we decided to pivot, and took the device that was used to turn SHS into prepaid and re-designed it to turn appliances into PAYG devices, an even bigger market we serve today.

There is no solution that does exactly what SOLshare does, which allows our end users to earn a direct income from the sun by selling the excess power on their SHS and allowing them to buy more energy when they need it all within a solar P2P microgrid. Our innovation, the SOLbox, is integrated with mobile money and allows our users to see their energy consumption in the value of currency and decide how they want to use energy.

SOLshare is propelling the systemic change of how people use and move electrons around the globe in the spirit of the new energy world fueled by the 5 D's. Our grids have consumed approximately 75 MWh and sold 25 MWh of electricity. However, this is merely scratching the surface, when compared to its $1 billion market opportunity (amount of excess energy only). By connecting all five million households with solar home systems across Bangladesh, with the 25 million people who lack access to electricity, SOLshare can create a series of interconnected microgrids that generate up to 250MW (~1.5% of Bangladesh’s total installed power capacity as of December 2019) and 2,400 MWh of battery storage. More importantly, by setting and controlling the transaction price within this microgrid system, SOLshare would establish a strong competitive advantage against new market entrants. In doing so, the Company’s work generates positive impact on overall literacy rates, female employment and empowerment, rural SME growth, decreased carbon emissions, increased health outcomes and increased GDP per capita.

To date, SOLshare’s peer-to-peer energy exchange platform, SOLbazaar, has connected nearly 700 households into 30 microgrids (28 in Bangladesh and 2 in Assam, India). Over the past year, both the size and scale of SOLshare's impact has increased. Our 30 P2P solar microgrids serve over 3,000 beneficiaries (over 5,000 during Covid due to increase in household size). We have had time to further develop our products (community PPAs for smart national grid connection) as well as refine our business model. Thanks to our Covid response we are now looking to serve over 27,000 people within the communities we work through energy subsidies, medical care packages and productive energy use appliances for women who have lost their jobs in manufacturing sectors like garments.

A deep dive into our end-users shows:

• P2P energy trading provides nearly 700 households, access over to 75 MWh of additional energy, valued at USD 75,923 

• Over 95 microbusiness, including 11 women, experience additional income valued at USD 6,315 through access to reliable energy 

• Selling excess energy of over 25 MWh customers earned additional income worth approximately USD 16,177 (53.44% of those living on $5/day earn an additional income selling excess energy) 

• P2P trading unlocks over 75 MWh reducing 50,000 kgCO2e, valued at approximately USD 6,910 

• Our SROI, calculated by Asia IIX Global at USD 4.85 for every dollar invested.

SOLshare currently has 30 P2P solar microgrids normally serving over 3,000 beneficiaries, now due to Covid the number of household members has increased allowing us to serve over 5,000 beneficiaries. Under the DEG Covid-19 Response fund we are now looking to serve over 27,000 people within the communities we work through energy subsidies, medical care packages, increasing energy access and energy for productive energy use and productive energy use appliances for women who have lost their jobs in manufacturing sectors like garments.

Within the next year SOLshare will be installing another 100 microgrids through which another 15,000 people will be served. In 5 years SOLshare aims to bring this number to 100,000 people.  

Our focus is not to just provide energy access. We want rural communities to have access to more services like those available in urban areas ultimately leading to rural empowerment and economic development as well as decreasing rural to urban migration. That is why we are constantly in the process of improving and expanding our technology. Future measures that will be included within our grids: 

• Billable Wi-Fi 
• EV charging pit stops
• A community PPA allowing us to implement the PCC
• Increased productive energy use through SOLbox NG (Next Generation) which will allow our users more power to use with AC or DC appliances.

Ultimately we hope to that our users will be able to have the life they want and use energy the way they want with the appliances and services they wish to have.

• Environmental: A lot of SOLshare's work is in char areas (river islands) which are off-grid remote communities that are very vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. 
• Financial: Being a platform provider and technology pioneer (the world’s very first solar peer-to-peer microgrid) requires significant investments with severely delayed returns. SOLshare has been paving the way and research for solar P2P grids which automatically leads to first mover disadvantages.
• Technical: Unless SOLshare can keep up with ever advancing and developing technology our products will become redundant. It is imperative that we keep improving.      
• Legal/Political: SOLshare currently operates in an unregulated sandbox which is easy now but could become very difficult if the situation changes. 
• Cultural: As the technology is new and unknown, cultural acceptance is difficult for most communities. 

• Environmental: Because of our decentralized system, our grids near the coast were not affected during the super-cyclone Amphan, unlike the national grid which was interrupted.
• Financial: Our view is fixed on our path to profitability at 750 grids installed with USD 15 average trade volume per connection.
• Technical: We are constantly in the process of updating and upgrading our technology stack, and have started outsourcing individual parts in the product development cycle. This is enabled by constant data collection and analysis in our backend as well as by being as close as possible to our final beneficiaries. 
• Legal/Political: We have already developed a proof of concept where grid integration is a possibility called the point of common coupling, that would allow these microgrids to integrate with the national grid and even feed energy back in. This could do wonders with the right policies in place and truly make every household within the country electrified. 
• Cultural: SOLshare has been able to overcome this by working with B2B partners that have field presence and experience making community engagement easier and ensuring local stakeholders are involved and aware of what the technology does and is capable of.

SOLshare offers its P2P smart microgrid platform in a B2B business model to solar home system distributors, among others. The SOLgrid platform consists of software and hardware products, offered in a simple service/sales model. The distributors act as the local grid operators for each of the installed microgrids and provide grid related products and maintenance services towards the end-user. Partners with whom we have worked with in the past and present:

Grameen Shakti (GS): The partnership of SOLshare and GS won the UNDESA ‘Powering the Future We Want Award’ USD 1million grant. This partnership has 20 microgrids installed at the moment serving over 2,500 beneficiaries.

Chars Development Research Center (CDRC), Rural Development Academy (RDA): is a rural development center particularly dedicated to improving the livelihoods of the poor and extreme poor char dwellers. CDRC operates under the administrative umbrella of RDA. It is uniquely competent in areas of poverty reduction, livelihood improvement and food security, empowering women and green technology. CDRC's work and experience in Char areas made them an excellent partner for SOLshare to work with. SOLshare recently won the P4G Startup Grant in partnership with CDRC-RDA.

Bright Green Energy Foundation (BGEF): With BGEF SOLshare installed its first B2B grids funded by GIZ.

UBOMUS (Upokulio Biddutayan O Mohila Unnayan Samity) & Pacific Solar: are organizations that SOLshare worked with early on to implement seven P2P solar microgrids. These were SOLshare’s first B2C grids installed with funding from IDCOL with Pacific Solar and UBOMUS being our implementing partner.

SOLshare offers its P2P smart microgrid platform in a B2B business model to solar home system distributors, among others. The SOLgrid platform consists of software and hardware products, offered in a simple service/sales model. The distributors act as the local grid operators for each of the installed microgrids and provide grid related products and maintenance services towards the end-user.

SOLshare counts on three different revenue streams: 

1. Hardware: sales revenue + margin on the SOLbox (smart meter device) and communications technology (IoT device); 

2. Software as a service towards our B2B customers for remote grid management; 

3. The trading fee of every kWh of energy traded among the end-users.

The long term emphasis is on the trading fee which acts similar to an AirBnB-like model.

We receive our revenues from our B2B customers (revenue flow 1) + 2)), as well as directly from the beneficiaries (revenue flow 3) which is split 50:50 with our B2B partners in order to keep the partnership fully aligned.

SOLshare follows a B2B model with partners that have strong field presence and knowledge of remote locations with existing solar home systems (SHS). Our customers have installed more than 60% of the current installation base of nearly 6 million SHS. Our end-users fall into three categories; consumers, prosumers and producers.

Over the past two years the quarterly volume of electricity purchased per customer has grown 400%. The number energy active households has doubled while the average energy value purchased by customers has increased by 250%. 

Our financial projections predict a revenue growth with a 7-yr CAGR of 83% based on two of our revenue streams. Our SOLbazaar (energy trading platform) will drive 42% of growth through increased trade volume and 38% through increased SOLbox sales. This is based on steady prosumer growth and retention and a strong increase in energy trading volume from increased number of grid connections, base electricity price reduction and modest trading fee increase. The SOLclock will drive 22% of growth through an increase in B2B customers and sales unit growth, which in turn is driven by product mix diversification (e.g. the different electrical appliances that SOLclock can be installed into, such as TVs, refrigerators, and air conditioners). The increase in sustainable revenue sources, like the SOLbazaar and SOLclock, will reduce the current reliance on project-based income to subsidize R&D.

Total amount of Funds raised till date: USD 5.16 million

Series A + Safe note: USD 2.76 million (in equity)

Grants, Funds & Prizes: USD 2.4 million (DEG, GIZ, Unilever, Siemens, GSMA, Microsoft, TEPCO, DENA, P4G, ADB etc.)

Revenues 2019: USD 805,150 (revenue streams + prizes)

US$ 2.75m funding required to reach EBITDA profitability

US$ 1.06m funding secured

US$ 895k through SAFE

US$ 165k through Grants

US$ 1.69m remaining funding requirement

Our estimated costs for 2020 is USD 1.5 million

For SOLshare winning the Elevate Prize would be an amazing accomplishment but more so for the poor marginalized communities that we work in. Developing and implementing a brand new solution which responds to the energy trilemma has held a myriad of first mover disadvantages for us. What has kept us going beyond the faith and support our partners, is our attention to customer feedback in continuing to develop the best product possible for our end user and thus we collaborated with the UK's TTP (The Technology Partner) to develop the SOLbox NG which will allow our end users the capacity to use a far wider range of productive energy loads. The Elevate Prize would help contribute to this in a huge way. As we continue to scale up with our new box we can truly provide energy security, energy equity and environmental sustainability through our network of solar P2P microgrids. As we venture into creating rural communities with urban services that includes EV charging and internet access with increased productive energy use we can achieve sustainable communities with rural economic development. Our innovative solution has potential global applications which we believe we can bring from an LDC like Bangladesh to the rest of the world.

SOLshare has collaborated with many organizations and hopes to collaborate with many new partners in the future. We prefer to have a symbiotic relationship with our partners in which both parties benefit from the collaboration. This is why we have a keen interest in partners who have deep knowledge of the sector and understanding of the technology and the market. We always appreciate mentorship and advice. Partners who bring with them new ideas and ways in which we can expand our work or technology. Or even find new ways in which to implement our technology with the partner's technology. At the end of the day what is most important to us are our end-users and having partners who understand that fact and want to help us continue improving lives is what we are really looking for.

SOLshare is always looking to collaborate with other organizations. 

• Organizations interested in financing our work and expand our microgrids 
• Organizations interested in helping further develop our technology & solution -especially our IT backbone
• Organizations interested in doing collaborations such as research and technology where SOLshare plays the technology implementer
• Organizations with new ideas for implementation of our solution
• Organization interested in implementing our solution in new areas