What is the name of your organization?
Asoba
What is the name of your solution?
Ona: Asoba's API with a Vision
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Data platform for integrating, managing, and maximizing economic value of renewable energy resources
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Cape Town, South Africa
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
South Africa
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Asoba is addressing the pressing issue of limited electricity access and inefficient energy use in Africa, starting in South Africa. The challenges are significant: more than 80% of the country's electricity still comes from coal, making the grid both dirty and inefficient. Load shedding has caused over 7,000 hours of power cuts, resulting in an estimated $13 billion in economic losses. There's also a 17-gigawatt gap between electricity supply and demand, and in 2023 alone, nearly 20 gigawatt hours of energy went to waste because the grid couldn't handle it.
Reliable electricity is essential for economic development—no country with abundant energy remains poor. But across the continent, outdated systems make it hard to integrate renewables, predict energy needs, and manage distributed sources of power.
Asoba’s virtual power plant helps solve these problems by improving how energy is forecasted, dispatched, and integrated into the grid. Our goal is to make energy systems more efficient, flexible, and responsive. In South Africa alone, distributed energy systems provide reliable power to 20M citizens—and the opportunity to improve lives by strengthening energy access across the continent is even greater.
What is your solution?
Asoba's VPP software aggregates and optimizes the power output of various DERs, enabling real-time grid balancing and private participation in energy markets. By utilizing predictive analytics for accurate forecasting of energy demand and supply, the platform ensures optimal energy distribution. Asoba’s platform efficiently delivers high quality data from sensors, smart meters and other IoT devices for forecasting, dispatch scheduling, and trade settlement. Ultimately providing electric grid network controls for integrating renewables onto the grid across Africa.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Asoba’s solution serves key energy stakeholders across Sub-Saharan Africa, including smart metering companies, energy traders, independent power producers (IPPs), and energy asset insurers. These groups are currently underserved due to inefficient grid management, lack of real-time data, and challenges in integrating decentralized renewable energy.
Smart metering companies benefit from Asoba’s platform, which improves data accuracy for billing and supports dynamic energy trading. Energy traders use Asoba’s tools to optimize trading strategies and predict supply-demand fluctuations, enhancing market access. IPPs leverage the virtual power plant (VPP) to optimize power dispatch, reduce costs, and reach new customers through direct and virtual power purchase agreements (PPAs). Energy asset insurers gain access to detailed, accurate data to inform actuarial models and reduce preventable claims.
Asoba’s VPP technology enables better energy distribution, efficient integration of renewable sources, and more accurate forecasting. These improvements help reduce energy costs, support reliable electricity access, and expand market opportunities for all stakeholders.
