Solartive

Solartive is a self-sustaining, productive use leveraging solar energy (PULSE) ecosystem that helps support locally-owned enterprises (agriculture, fishery, craftmanship) through cooperative-based methods and funding.

Agriculture in Indonesia is one of the key sectors within the Indonesian economy, covering 41% of our total labor force. This sector is predominantly 93% run by smallholder farmers. The problem is that most of them are not exposed to the current technology, leading to little growth within the sector. 

These farmers majority stay in rural, and some of them live in the most impoverished, unelectrified populated areas. One of the area with 89% population farms to sustain their living (most are subsistence farming) is East Nusa Tenggara. They have photovoltaic potential with 680 kWh/kWp yearly, but the province only has 50% electrification rate and house some of the lowest human development index score population. 

Here, we understand that access plays a vital role in the well-being and development of a community where we see Productive Use Leveraging Solar Energy (PULSE) application for agriculture could be key to unlocking better livelihood and economic empowerment for these rural areas. 

Solartive is a self-sustaining, productive use leveraging solar energy (PULSE) ecosystem that helps support locally-owned enterprises (agriculture, fishery, craftmanship) through cooperative-based methods and funding.

In Indonesia, every rural area has local cooperatives that supports the economic and community development. The organization has a basecamp in the form of a house which the local community uses as an activity center. To alleviate the energy distribution, this house will be used as the place to install off-grid solar panels.

The ecosystem starts where we build a 1000 Watt solar panel system integrated into a localized site in the village where farm appliances are connected. This system will power a 300W corn sheller and power wall designed to provide an additional 150 Watt for lamps, device chargers, or other appliances required by local farmers. Our system is equipped with a novel passive cooling system using PCM and a combined battery controller to enhance the performance and utility of our system. 

Then, we provide additional agricultural tools in the house, such as water pumps for irrigation and refrigerators for storing crops. Then, educate them on how to utilize the tools which lead these farmers to develop agricultural transformation and enhance the livelihood and food security of people in the area. This part will be the middle service to increase agricultural productivity where we push the involvement of local youth talents. 

Due to high poverty rate, installment cost for technology will be supported by grants  from donor parties and company CSR on top of pay-as-you-go payment from cooperative's fund or collective village funds. To ease the maintenance and panel replacement, we will work with cooperative members to educate with maintenance and financing option for the system. Moreover, educational training will be conducted at the start of the project to support the sustainable energy transition.

Solartive ecosystem will benefit farmers in impoverished rural, unelectrified areas in Indonesia coming from the lower economy class. Farming in Indonesia becomes more expensive, yet they receive low income. In an effort to address this problem, Solartive ecosystem allows farmers to be more efficient which leads to increased profit margins. With the low-maintenance paraffin based passive cooling system, the Solartive solar grid will be affordable for farmers.  Moreover, the farmers will be aided with agricultural appliance in order to Solartive creating powerful impact with easy access for the farmers in rural area,

In each rural city where Solartive is installed, it is projected that our solution will enable 90% of the city population to have access to electricity as well as digital agricultural appliances. This ecosystem will benefit the rural Indonesia citizens, mainly farmers. A new efficient way of working will help farmers in Indonesia to increase farming productivity by 9%. Therefore, rural areas in Indonesia will experience a 15% decrease in poverty rate and a considerable growth in the farming industry.

Our team has previously worked together to develop an award-winning Highly-efficient, Vaseline-based, Solar Panel Cooling System called Soljel that received funding from US-based Venture Capital, SJF Ventures. Other winning projects we have been working on together are solutions for various business IT-case competitions within the fintech, AI-solution provider, marketing, and agritech industries. Most of the credits of our success as a team should be given to our ability to integrate the diverse expertise and experience each one of us has to efficiently arrive at an optimal solution to a problem given.

Our first member Josiah is currently working alongside professors with expertise in renewable energy to develop a cost-sustainable solar panel for his final project in University. With the intellectual and material resources given by the university to back his research, Josiah will help us with the technical and engineering aspect to develop an off-grid solar panel that is most suitable for our project. 

The second member Nailah is currently a Sustainability Research Assistant at the World Research Institutes with extensive experiences on discussing renewable energies and SDGs efforts in International forums such as UNLEASH. With her networks, insights, and research resources, Nailah will help us on identifying the biggest impact opportunities for our project and develop objectives and plans to ensure the success of our project. 

Our third member Pocut is currently a research assistant at Statistic and Quality Engineering Laboratory in the University of Indonesia. With her data analysis and insight generation expertise and tool resources, she will guide our team on analyzing data to choose the optimal decisions throughout our project. 

Fauzia is currently a research assistant at Management Information System and Decision Support Laboratory in University of Indonesia. With her research experience in Business Process Re-engineering and enterprise resource planning, she will guide our team to identify innovation points within our project and ensure operational excellence through the right project management.

As these experiences have cultivated our capabilities with proven track record and achievements, we believe we are able to turn our ideas into reality; giving thousands of hopes through affordable renewable energy for village community in southern region of East Nusa Tenggara.

Our team conducted initial market research through secondary research to understand the major struggles faced by Indonesia citizens living in rural areas. After our initial findings, we did an exploratory semi-guided interview with a local community in East Nusa Tenggara named Sahabat Lentera Desa to better understand Solartive potential users according to our team’s objectives. Afterwards, we developed the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of Solartive and consulted the idea with the members of Society of Renewable Energy from University of Indonesia (SRE UI) to collect feedback and include it in our product iteration. SRE UI is an organization that has been involved in many projects focusing on promoting the use of clean energy to rural areas in Indonesia.

We Innovate by developing existing technologies and building a system for self-sustaining agricultural development. For the Solar Panel Technology, we conducted in-depth research with Heat Lab Transfer Indonesia to develop existing solar panels to be cheaper and more efficient by using a passive cooling mechanism. This upgraded solar panel will be used in the project.

Our team developed a scheme to gain an additional source of income through entrepreneurship programs Powered by Solar Panel. Letting them to utilize the energy the most to improve their economic communities. 

Other innovative system that we put forefront is the low-to-no cost, reliable, and easy access to electricity through solar panel funded by share-profit mechanism from entrepreneurship program. We aim to reach cooperative members composed of household members in rural impellers and connecting them with donators from NGOs and renewable energy workshops participates.

This initiative will also contribute to National Development by Helping Underdeveloped Societies at the edge of our country by targeting them as our benefits in solar panel system implementation. 

Through Solartive, we believe small rooted changes will impact the community deeply creating a strong foundation for them to grow. Our team does the opposite of what most people do, we do not target a big market with the same problem, but we focus on solving problems that are so binding to unreachable particular communities and provide comprehensive solutions to them because we believe that #SimpleRealChange can lead to revolution and disruption on a bigger scale.

Our big goal is to promote sustainable living by the utilization of renewable energy among farmers with affordable cost. Our goal is to increase farming efficiency which will result in a 9% productivity increase within 6 months. Next year objectives are to gather enough money from public-private partnership to complete two projects in the underdeveloped regions in Indonesia.

Through meticulous preparation, our team has phased the timeline in which the activities can be summarized to research, funding, product development, and execution within 1 year. We are also planning to educate the importance of utilizing green energy for electricity.

The direct impact of Solartive are:

• Achieve up to 90% electricity access in unelectrified rural regions

• Decreasing poverty rate by up to 15% in rural areas by 2024

• Reduced 4.380 kg CO2 in 2024

• Increase agriculture productivity in rural areas by 9% in 2024

The core technologies involved in our solution cover 2 aspects which are improved performance of the solar panel module we use and digital platform (App, Website and Social Media) to connect our prospected consumer and producers for our novel business strategy. Those tech described are as follows:

1. PCM (Phase Change Material) based Passive Cooling System for Solar Panel

Solar panel installation is always bound to limitations as it interacts with heat. The increasing temperature could cut down its efficiency by up to 20% which ironically happened at the same time panel generates power during the day. As reported by Solargis, the Indonesian region has a relatively intense average daily solar intensity of 4.6 kWh/m2 followed by heat radiation responsible for around 35 °C typical day temperature or even 39 °C in some areas. This heat condition negatively affects most panel installations in Indonesia which actually could be prevented if the whole system was equipped by a cooling system.

PCM or Phase Change Materials are substances that absorb and release sufficient heat energy when they change phase (known as latent heat). This characteristic allows PCM to work as a cooling system in the environment that produces a lot of heat such as a solar cell in the daytime. During the day, PCM will absorb heat from the environment and turn to liquid, and subsequently, during the night, those PCM will release the heat back to the environment and turn back to solid. 

PCM-based cooling system is novel complementary panel that could be attached on the back of photovoltaic panel without complicated integration. The PCM itself are made from recycled or natural paraffin combined with carbon powder and other chemical to achieve desired properties. The advantages of this system are passive, non-toxic and outstanding in improving panel efficinency and therefore its lifespan. Comparatively, typical panel cooling system such as water or air sprayer, thin film, flow jacket or others include the use of active cooling system which require additional energy or even toxic

2. IoT in Solar Panel Monitoring

The Internet of Things describes the network of physical objects that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems over the internet (Oracle).

As solar panels not only become a source of energy but also an implementation of future technology, the collection of operating data can be valuable. This insight can be solved using an IoT ecosystem installed alongside panel installation. For our minimum viable product, the system can be approached using an on-site ESP developer board connected to a web-based internet database to transfer the local insight to be processed and presented on other platforms.

3. Website and Application Development

A website is a collection of publicly accessible, interlinked web pages that is identified by a common domain name and can be accessed using various computing devices. On the other hand, a mobile application is a software application developed specifically for use on small, wireless computing devices, such as smartphones and tablets, rather than desktop or laptop computers. These two technologies are the backbone of the digital business that our team initiated. 

As we are creating a platform for everyday people to invest in renewable energy and provider to install renewable energy systems, we will rely heavily on the website and app to be the interface for them to interact with each other and with us, to expand market reach and execute the business operations. For our minimum viable strategy, we will utilize the common website builder such as WordPress for our website and use an app builder like Flutter or android studio for our early mobile app.

The foreseeable future of this ecosystem can benefit the use of Machine Learning to better connect consumers, producers, and partners. Machine learning can be used to create recommendations in choosing the best option on the platform or give prediction and optimization on daily interaction

4. Social Media

Social media is a computer-based technology that facilitates the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and information through the building of virtual networks and communities. On our business strategy, social media plays important roles in building brand and network of consumer and providers.

In one year, Solartive will be able to serve 27.000 people through its pilot project in Soe, a rural city in the East of Nusa Tenggara Province in Indonesia. Solartive technology is designed for the agriculture sector and 75% of Soe citizens are farmers (from a population of 41.402 people). Therefore, by utilizing the local cooperatives and affordable electricity price to ease the access of using Solartive, the farmers’ agriculture productivity will increase by 15% in one year.

• Legal, we have a government company here monopolizing all integral business including electricity. Creating new remote small grid for separate area potentially burden us a legal issue. 
• RE adaptation is still new in our country, democratizing renewable energy require more effori in socialization and education
• Financial, we need funding for the early years of operation
• Technical and Cultural

In distributing the electricity produced in Indonesia’s rural areas, energy losses often occur in transmission lines. The losses caused by damage of the distribution network and electricity theft, which shows financial, technical, and cultural issues. However, by having a substantial initial capital to invest on creating high quality transmission infrastructure and giving local education to help change this social behavior, the risk can be mitigated. Furthermore, in effort to achieve financial and social support, our team needs to form public-private partnerships.

• Penn Climate Ventures and SJF ventures are using their capital in the form of grants to support prototype development and piloting projects. 
• World Federation of United Nations Association and SpareBank1 SMN for providing support in the form of mentorship, and product development and strategic planning advice. 
• Heat Transfer Laboratory of Mechanical Engineering Faculty Universitas Indonesia, Statistic and Quality Laboratory Laboratory of Industrial Engineering Universitas Indonesia, and Management Information Support and Decision System of Industrial Engineering Universitas Indonesia on technology development and a broader research partnership. 

Our business model is service subsidization of our highly efficient, reliable, and low-cost solar panel, made possible by recycled-plastic based passive cooling systems, to agriculture cooperatives in highly unelectrified areas in Indonesia. Our technology aims to increase productivity and profits of these cooperatives and its members and offers the following value propositions:

• Additional source of income through increased productivity through Solar panel based PULSE system.

• Low-to-no cost, reliable, and easy access to electricity through solar panel funded by margin taken from the one pulse installed cooperative's profits.

• Education and employment of local youth as Solartive agents to provide system maintenance, awareness, and education of Solartive’s mission to their own and neighboring communities.

For our project to be sustainable we aims to gain revenues from the following stream:

• Workshop and crowdfunding donations

• 5% sales margin from agriculture entrepreneurship program powered by PULSE ecosystem in cooperative

With this project being sustainable, we aim to create the following impact in accordance with SDG:

• Achieve up to 90% electricity access in unelectrified rural regions

• Decreasing poverty rate by up to 15% in rural areas by 2024

• Reduced 4.380 kg CO2 in 2024

For more complete view of our business model, access our business model canvas below:

Social Business Model Canvas

We plan to adopt service-subsidization and organizational support business models on existing village cooperatives throughout low-income, unelectrified areas in Indonesia. Our revenue stream consists of leasing costs taken from the 5% profit margin of our agriculture enterprise program powered by our PULSE technology within each of our partner cooperatives. 

The other source of our revenue stream will be generated by workshop based workshops that will be powered by our local youth from Solartive ambassador programs with partnership from NGOs, community, and tourism platforms on ecotourism and renewable energy workshops. Below is a detailed financial projection of Solartive business model that showcases its financial sustainability in the long-term. 

Summarized below is the financial projection breakdown of revenue, cost, and profit, in addition to feasibility parameters such as a positive NPV, small payback period ratio close to zero, and positive NCF growth, deeming our project to be sustainable in the long term. 

More detailed financial projection below: 

Financial Projection