The Minigrid Game

For over 1 billion people worldwide without electricity access, renewable energy minigrids are a potential solution. Yet high capital costs, low revenue, and minigrid management challenges frequently lead to project failure and abandonment. One root cause is a lack of community involvement, resulting in poorly sized systems, limited load growth and social conflicts around financial and demand management. While community involvement is recognized as critical for project success, effective engagement methods and tools to include communities in design and management are non-existent. 

To ensure communities have a voice in planning energy systems, we have developed and demonstrated a novel minigrid planning approach called The Minigrid Game. Using a networked, computer-based simulation, a group of players collectively plan a renewable energy minigrid that meets their electricity needs and household budgets. The Minigrid Game facilitates meaningful community participation, ensuring long-term viability and sustainability of minigrids worldwide.

Worldwide, renewable energy minigrids hold great promise for providing electricity to over 1 billion people without access. Yet, global uptake has been slow due to high costs and the complexity of managing a limited supply of electricity for a newly electrified and interconnected community. Practical challenges often include limited or slow uptake of productive use, underpayment or theft of power, disputes over load management, and a general lack of trust between the community and the electricity provider. While community buy-in is essential for successful minigrid implementation, project developers often ignore community involvement as there is little knowledge of effective community participation methods. The current status quo of limited or token community involvement often leads to poor system design and eventual project abandonment. 

Fundamentally, we are concerned with situations where the role and interests of community members are sidelined in order to expedite the delivery of new energy infrastructure. While project developers rarely intend to marginalize the community, the lack of proven methods and replicable approaches for community engagement makes it difficult to avoid this unfortunate outcome. We serve to bridge this gap by offering a new tool and process for community members and project developers to collaborate on minigrid planning.

An estimated 1.1 billion people currently do not have access to electricity. According to the IEA, approximately 450 million of these individuals live in remote communities too far from a centralized power grid, but dense enough to support renewable energy minigrids. A minigrid is a stand-alone power system that interconnects local households and businesses to one or more shared power sources. The great potential for minigrids is to provide more than just basic lighting or small uses like phone charging. By sharing a larger source, communities can power clinics and schools; or support local enterprises with power for water pumping, refrigeration or other industrial processes. Sharing a scarce and expensive resource, however, creates complex social and technical challenges faced by the service provider and the community. 

Our organization has worked with rural communities, primarily in Southeast Asia, for the past 5 years to understand and collaborate on minigrid planning and management. We have merged our team’s diverse expertise in engineering, energy planning, anthropology and community development, to develop and deploy new participatory approaches to design and manage village minigrids. We have also worked with project developers to understand their needs and introduce our new approach to minigrid design.

The Minigrid Game is a participatory energy planning tool and process built around a software simulation of a renewable energy minigrid. The game is a networked computer-based, role-playing game, which enables community members to come together to build a virtual village-wide minigrid that serves the specific energy needs of their community. In the game, players explore both individual and collective decisions related to minigrid planning and operations. Fundamentally, The Minigrid Game aims to: 

1. educate the community on the operation and economics of a mini-grid, and 
2. generate solutions and build consensus on system design and implementation.

To implement a Minigrid Game planning workshop, a facilitator acts as “system operator” and leads a group of up to 40 participants who role-play their behavior as electricity consumers using a software interface deployed on a laptop or tablet. The devices are networked through a local wifi network with each device representing a household controlled by a group of 3-4 players. Households purchase and operate their appliances, and manage an energy budget by choosing to pay or not pay their monthly electricity bill. Actions synchronize over the network so that players can see the system-wide impact of individual choices, like system overloading and insufficient tariff collection. Players also face unexpected challenges such as income disruptions, storm damage, or electricity theft and must find ways to ensure the system remains financially viable while meeting the whole community’s electricity demand. 

Workshop facilitators guide the discussion around specific topics of interest, such as tariff design, electricity theft, or demand management. Utilizing a game format not only increases engagement and accessibility, but also allows a facilitator to address sensitive subjects (such as theft) in a non-judgmental environment. 

The Minigrid Game is participatory, inclusive and cooperative, and enables communities to build consensus on planning and operational decisions such as system sizing, tariffs, and demand-side management.

Current methods for designing energy systems for off-grid communities frequently lack substantive forms community engagement. Minigrid project developers typically administer surveys or conduct interviews to estimate future demand, without much further interaction. The use of surveys in this context are notorious for providing inaccurate demand estimates; often because of the difficulty in estimating willingness to pay for an unfamiliar service and due to the underlying power dynamic between the interviewer and the informant. 

Our approach fundamentally disrupts the status quo due to three aspects. First, we directly explore the connections between technology, energy use, and personal finances through our simulation platform. Estimating willingness-to-pay by “playing through” different pricing and capacity scenarios is much more effective than an interview or survey. Second, we place the community members in a position of power by letting them control their game actions. This format mitigates the bias normally associated with a rural villager responding to questions from a more powerful outsider. The community members also play together, illustrating the impact of their individual choices on system-wide outcomes; something not possible with conventional one-on-one interactions.   

Third, we raise everyone’s expectations for how involved the community can and should be in the design process. We not only solicit more accurate information to improve design, we also enable community members to lead the decision-making process. Questions on availability of power, load management protocols, tariff design, penalties for theft, can all be explored and solved collaboratively by the community.

The core technology behind the Minigrid Game is software. We have developed a web-based application that simulates the operation of a renewable energy minigrid. The workshop facilitator uses a host computer to role play as a “system operator” and sets system-wide parameters, such as the generation capacity and profile, tariffs, and demand constraints. Community members use client devices that communicate with the host over a local wifi network, receiving system parameters and state variables, while sending their own actions back to the host. The client devices represent households and take actions such as purchasing and operating appliances, and paying or not paying electricity bills. 

The software is highly graphical and interactive, intended for use by individuals with little or no background in digital devices. It is also highly customizable. Appliances that households can purchase are populated based on what is available in local markets and priced in local currency. Game events that influence household incomes and electricity demand, such as festivals, receiving remittances from relatives, or weather-related damage to infrastructure, can all be customized to the local context. 

To deploy in the field, The Minigrid Game only requires a laptop computer as the host, tablets or notebooks as the clients, and a router to set up a local wifi network. No internet connection is needed. If electricity is not available, an auxiliary power supply can provide the small amount of power needed.

Our use of the Minigrid Game has confirmed that increased participation of community members in minigrid design will increase a project’s technical and financial viability, as well as build institutional capacity to adapt to future changes. 

Our theory of change is rooted in the use of participatory methods to solve common-pool-resource problems; in this case, managing a finite electricity supply among competing households. We use the following hierarchy of “levels of participation” (from least to greatest) to guide our approach: 

(a) Information Gathering: improved information flow from community members to project developer;

(b) Capacity Building: greater understanding among community members of the technology, their individual roles as users, and the impacts of their actions on system-wide consequences (e.g., excessive demand or insufficient revenue); 

(c) Community Mobilization: involvement of community members in actual decision-making regarding minigrid design. 

Each level of participation leads to distinct improvements in minigrid design and operation. With improved information gathering, project developers generate more accurate estimates of willingness to pay for energy services, leading to more appropriate system sizing and tariff design. 

Increasing users' technological understanding increases transparency and builds trust between community members and developers. Users are more likely to cooperate with rules and regulations. They can also align their preferences for productive use with services the minigrid can sustain.

Finally, by involving communities in decision-making, developers access indigenous knowledge on resource management and help build resilient local institutions that will govern the energy system into the future.

To date, we have deployed Minigrid Game workshops in six communities. This number includes five villages in Malaysian Borneo and one in the Irrawaddy Delta region of Myanmar, totaling approximately 150 households or over 1,000 individuals. In addition to rural villagers, we have also used the Minigrid Game to train energy access practitioners through 3 online webinars and a workshop for NZMATES program staff in Ambon, Indonesia. 

All of our past deployments have relied on our organization directly leading the Minigrid Game planning workshops and following through with system design or improvements. Our scale is therefore limited by the number of community projects we can directly be involved in. Our plan for this and next year is to spin off a new for-profit organization that will be responsible for developing, licensing and supporting the Minigrid Game software, with our primary customers being minigrid project developers and other energy access practitioners and educators. Our impact will then be able to scale significantly beyond the current level. 

In one year we would like to distribute licenses for the Minigrid Game to 50 minigrid project developers. A typical small or medium size minigrid developer may work on 2 projects per year serving a total of 500 households, or 2,000 people. By reaching 50 project developers, we have the potential to impact 100,000 people. 

We are targeting 1,000 – 2,000 minigrid developers within 5 years, which would enable us to impact 2 to 4 million people.

Over the next year, we aim to commercialize The Minigrid Game by developing a licensing platform for two distinct markets - minigrid project developers and educators. For educators, the game is interactive and engaging in a classroom setting and can teach students complex concepts in minigrid operations and economics, and governance of common-pool resources. For minigrid developers, The Minigrid Game fills a gap in practical approaches for community engagement and will be an indispensable component of their project development toolkit.

Our business model involves three revenue streams:

• Licensing fees: Users, both educational and professional, will pay an annual license fee for access to the software, periodic updates and online documentation.

• Training: We provide in-person training to organizations or groups covering use of the tool and an overall community engagement plan.

• Consulting: A projects team will work directly on community projects, leveraging our substantial experience in minigrid design and participatory planning.

Over the next five years, we have two goals: reach a broader audience through integration with complementary minigrid design tools (e.g., HOMER Microgrid); and develop additional modules for The Minigrid Game.

In particular, we plan to develop a Productive Use Module to explore differentiated tariffs and income generation. This aligns with our broader mission to promote sustainable social impact, as productive end uses are key to ensuring the financial viability of minigrid systems.

Additional modules could explore possibilities relating to the impact of project finance on minigrid economics or the integration of energy with other services, such as communication technologies.

Financial Barrier: Resources to support continuous software development. 

To date, Energy Action Partners has undertaken development and deployment of the Minigrid Game as a nonprofit organization, relying on charitable contributions and grants to support our work. The nature of a nonprofit organization is such that revenue streams are inconsistent and resource development is time-consuming. For Energy Action Partners, this barrier is compounded by the fact that community engagement tends to be undervalued, and therefore underfunded, in rural electrification projects. Insufficient and unreliable funding hinders our ability to improve our software and methods, thereby limiting the scope of users whom the Minigrid Game can support.

Barriers to Scale: Demand for The Minigrid Game from project developers may be inhibited by:

• Insufficient time and resources for project feasibility studies

• Lack of awareness of community engagement benefits

• Lack of trust in communities' capacity to participate

Often, minigrid project developers are unaware of the critical role that community engagement plays in ensuring minigrid viability and sustainability. Those who are more aware of its importance often lack the resources to allocate sufficient time to project feasibility studies and participatory planning activities.

Awareness of community involvement in minigrid planning and management is critical, not only among project developers, but also among policy makers, development organizations and project financiers who allocate resources to fund this type of activity.

Additional barriers to scale include:

• Difficulties associated with accessing geographically diverse markets

• Competition from a similar tool (none yet discovered) 

• Challenges in raising capital and managing organizational growth

To increase awareness and demand from project developers globally, we have identified an initial set of minigrid developers interested in partnering with us. We will collaborate with them to build evidence on the practical benefits of the Minigrid Game that we will publish through international fora and energy access publications.

To address limited resources, we are establishing a new socially-oriented business with a new revenue model that will include software licensing and user training. This new business will focus primarily on development, distribution and support for the Minigrid Game. The nonprofit organization will continue to focus on community development activities and will become a key partner for the software company, providing valuable knowledge on community deployments. 

We are raising funds to support software development costs and the addition of new team members for the social enterprise. Adding new features to the software will allow us to distribute and support a licensable version that can be used by a broad range of users. Development priorities for the Minigrid Game include the following: 

• Improve UI responsiveness for a range of devices
• Expand options for energy generation technologies
• Expand demand-side options (e.g. enable simulation of load scheduling, load sharing, etc.)
• Develop a Productive Use Module to explore differentiated tariffs and income generation
• Develop a Project Finance Module to include impact of financing structure on costs and pricing
• Multilingual platform for easy inclusion of new languages
• Data analytics capability to evaluate game actions
• License keys and encryption

We have 5 full-time staff working on developing The Minigrid Game software as well as community engagement Minigrid Game workshop modules. 

We also have 2 part-time, project-based team members who support Minigrid Game deployments and Minigrid Game software development. 

We have a partnership with an experienced software development and design team, Precoo (www.precoo.co) that has helped with full-stack development of The Minigrid Game software since 2017.

We have a diverse team of international experts working on renewable energy, community development, and product development for developing communities. Collectively, our team has over ten years of experience in developing renewable energy minigrids in South/Southeast Asia and East Africa, twenty years of experience in community development, engagement and international development, as well as over 15 years of developing educational programs and trainings in energy and sustainability studies. 

From our experience working with communities and minigrids, we recognize that clean and affordable energy is central to advancing human development. However, our team looks beyond metrics of kilowatts-installed or users-connected to uphold the values of inclusiveness, community empowerment, and long-term positive sustainable social impact. Our organization specializes in leading collaborative efforts to improve access to sustainable energy through a participatory community approach. 

We have deployed this approach in community minigrids in Malaysia and Myanmar. We have presented our work at a number of international conferences, webinars, and have been featured in multiple publications and newsletters targeting the energy access community. We have been contacted by mini-grid developers, development organizations, public authorities, and educators, asking to use our tool for new project development, training developers, designing tenders, and teaching students. We strongly believe that our tool serves as a best-practice approach for community engagement and social assessment towards which we plan to invest, and aim to distribute more broadly.

Precoo (www.precoo.co) (2017 - present): a software development and design firm based in Taiwan. Precoo supports full-stack development of The Minigrid Game software.

TONIBUNG (2014 - present): an indigenous-lead, minigrid developer based in Sabah, Malaysia. TONIBUNG develops rural and inclusive community minigrid systems. Through our partnership, we have run community workshops on minigrid operations and management and supported their R&D efforts. We plan to continue using the Minigrid Game to support their upcoming projects. 

NZMATES (www.nzmates.org) (2018 - present): a technical assistance program for rural electricity provision in the Malluku Province of Indonesia. We provide training to program staff and stakeholders on community engagement in minigrid planning. 

Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy (wise.uwaterloo.ca) (2018 - present): hosted student interns and participant in annual meetings. 

Smart Villages (www.e4sv.org) (2019): co-applicant for upcoming grant Energy Catalyst Round 7 funded by Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and UK Department for International Development (DFID).

The primary beneficiaries of the Minigrid Game are rural, disadvantaged, off-grid communities with limited or no access to electricity. Our tool improves the design and long-term sustainability of renewable energy microgrids and enhances the social impact of electricity access by building local management capacity and enabling productive use. Our deployment model to date has relied on our organization running planning workshops directly with communities. While this approach has helped improve our design of the tool, our impact is limited to the number of communities that we can directly serve as a community-focused nonprofit.

We now aim to develop a public version of The Minigrid Game software that we can license to microgrid developers, energy access practitioners, and educators. Without any marketing effort to date and only a few conference presentations, we routinely receive requests from developers to use our tool in their projects and from educators to use it in their classrooms.

We are establishing a new for-profit social enterprise that will implement a new deployment model involving three revenue streams: (1) licensing of The Minigrid Game software, (2) user training through in-person workshops or webinars, and (3) consulting for individual projects. We will also provide ongoing technical support for anyone who has purchased a license.

In order to scale and achieve financial sustainability for The Minigrid Game, we are transitioning from a grant-based approach that funds our nonprofit work with individual communities to an “Entrepreneur Support Model” whereby we sell our software and services to other energy access practitioners. We plan to work through this transition in the following phases:

• Step 1: Product refinement (6 months) – create a public distribution version of The Minigrid Game with a robust licensing platform and user documentation. (Grant funded).
• Step 2: Target partnerships (12 months) – train other microgrid developers to deploy the tool on their projects. (Funded as grant co-applicant and through consulting fees)
• Step 3: Scaling the business (24 months) – build in-house development and operational team to maintain product support, provide training, and expand marketing. (Investment capital).
• Step 4: Financial sustainability (ongoing) – combine three revenue streams of software licensing, training workshops, and consulting services to maintain financial sustainability (Fee for product and services). 

With our new deployment model, our costs will be driven by software development and marketing, as opposed to field staff, which will allow us to scale. We are targeting 20,000 users in 3 years with annual license fee of $100, which would generate $2 million annually.

Our work in promoting meaningful participation in designing and developing community minigrids aligns very well with the "Community-Driven Innovation" Solve challenge. As interest in our work has grown, we are transitioning to a social enterprise that will distribute our software tools commercially and continue to support energy access practitioners through training and consultancy. We are greatly encouraged by the positive interest we have received, but we have also recognized that our current organizational model must adapt to meet this growing demand. Insufficient resources/funds, lack of awareness on the role of community engagement, raising capital and managing organizational growth, inability to access geographically diverse markets and competition from a similar tool (none yet discovered) are a few of the challenges we face. 

We believe that the Solve Challenge Grant will play a central role in supporting our transformation and enabling us to scale our impact. Additionally, we believe that Solve’s mentorship and entrepreneurship training will help us effectively build and establish our social enterprise that will eventually support global distribution of The Minigrid Game, user training and technical support.

International organizations

• Sustainable Energy for All (https://www.seforall.org/)
• Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (https://www.esmap.org/)
• Power Africa (https://www.usaid.gov/powerafrica)

Game & development organizations

• Games for Change (http://www.gamesforchange.org/)

Software development firms

• support in software development and licensing

Legal firms

• support in software licensing and copyrighting

We are applying for the “GM Prize on Community-Driven Innovation” as our work directly serves marginalized and underrepresented communities mostly sidelined and not included in renewable energy minigrid design, planning and management. Through our participatory Minigrid Game approach, we aim to build affordable and sustainable energy minigrids and facilitate productive use of energy in order to improve livelihoods and foster community development. This Prize will help us achieve this by enabling the development of a new module on productive use and village enterprise development. The rural and remote communities with whom we work often have highly limited opportunities for employment and income generation; enterprise development can therefore have transformative implications for community development and social mobility. By adding a productive use module to the Minigrid Game, we can better incorporate productive use planning and coordination into minigrid design.

We will utilize the Prize towards: 

1. Updating The Minigrid Game software and features to add a new productive use module for village enterprise development 

2. Field testing and deployment of the productive use module in three rural communities in Southeast Asia (personnel costs, workshop delivery, workshop equipment and supplies, travel)

We believe that we are a strong fit for the Innovation for Women Prize. Through our work, we have seen how conversations around energy access systematically neglect gender and fail to recognize the value of women’s involvement in energy system design and management. At times, women are excluded completely from energy planning, despite being primary constituents and consumers of electricity in their homes. Thus, we go out of our way to ensure that women are involved in every stage of our projects, including in ongoing management processes.

Our tool improves the quality of life for women/girls by offering them leadership, income-generation and educational opportunities. Our approach prioritizes women’s involvement in planning and management of their energy systems, centering their energy-related concerns and priorities. As a result, gender-inclusive energy systems are developed reducing hard labor, freeing up time, and enabling income generation among other benefits which they may prioritize. 

This generous prize will play a central role in scaling our impact on women/girls. With the resources provided, we will take our emphasis on gender a step further and develop training and Minigrid Game workshops exclusively for women/girls. This will facilitate an environment in which they can express their viewpoints without restraint, and gendered energy-related priorities can be elicited with more clarity and deliberateness. 

We will utilize the Prize towards:

1. Key software updates

2. Field testing and deployment of all-women Minigrid Game workshops in three rural communities in Southeast Asia (personnel costs, workshop delivery, workshop equipment and supplies, travel)

Through our work with The Minigrid Game, our organization is actively reimagining and rethinking the energy access paradigm by prioritizing the role of communities in minigrid development and managing energy resources. Unlike the more conventional technology or business model-related innovations in the energy access space, we disrupt the paradigm by creating adaptable and participatory tools and methods that renewable energy minigrid developers can use to substantively engage communities in the planning and management of their own energy systems. With effective participation, minigrid planning and implementation is greatly improved, leading to increased social and economic impact.  

We aim to scale the impact of our work by transitioning to a social enterprise that will publicly distribute The Minigrid Game and support energy access practitioners through training and consultancy. We will use this Prize towards;

• Updating The Minigrid Game software to include license management and an instructional manual to support users

• Deployment and field testing of updated version

• Establishing a new business to develop, disseminate, promote and support The Minigrid Game tool