What is the name of your organization?
Solar SEED
What is the name of your solution?
Solar SEED Smart Clean Cooking
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
The Solar SEED Smart Clean Cooking system makes solar electric cooking more accessible for low-resource communities by reducing cost and complexity.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
New York, NY, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
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?
Globally almost 3 billion cook with polluting fuels like kerosene, wood, charcoal, and dung, resulting in significant health problems such as lung cancer, pneumonia, and heart disease. Additionally, over 700 million households spend ~$2.4 trillion USD annually on such toxic cooking fuels.
Most clean cooking solutions available still involve burning biomass fuels, liquefied petroleum gas, ethanol, and biogas that emit toxic fumes and GHGs. Alternatively, solar electric cooking technologies come with significant shortcomings that limit uptake in resource-poor communities at the base-of-the-pyramid; primarily high cost and technical complexity. Manufacturers like Sunspot and SoULS are producing solar electric clean cooking systems, but these have a high price point (>$900 USD) making them too expensive for low-income populations.
Only 3.2% of inhabitants in Zambia can cook or use lights powered by electricity at home, and over half of urban households rely on charcoal as their primary cooking energy source (78% of total energy consumption). The high dependence on charcoal is a major driver of health issues (600,000 women in Africa die from conditions brought on by indoor air pollution), and deforestation (wood fuel use in Zambia results in significant deforestation, and up to 300 thousand hectares of soil are lost annually).
What is your solution?
Smart Clean Cooking system reduces cost and technical complexity, delivering end-users a more affordable stepping-stone to energy sufficiency by producing off-grid electricity to power various household appliances without relying on batteries.
Our patented solution creates a battery-optional, standalone energy system that can power induction cookstoves, electric pressure cookers (EPCs), and even refrigerators, agro-processing equipment, and tools for micro-industrialization. Our technology harnesses solar PV to produce DC and AC electricity without battery storage and transitions into fully autonomous off-grid systems by adding batteries (LA/LFP). Additionally, if batteries or backup generators fail, our technology de-risks off-grid systems with a safety net against complete loss of electricity by reverting to 'Day-Time' mode. Anyone can easily be trained to install and operate our basic Tier 1 to Tier 4+ battery-free systems. We are testing a new feature allowing the connection of individual systems to form a DC micro-grid to aggregate energy production and enable community-level electrification.
Our approach provides an easier entry-point for first-time solar technology users, and establishes a new, powerful first-rung energy system (avg. $0.70 per watt), that empowers end-users to achieve their aspirations with the ability to support their present and future electricity needs according to personal or situational limitations.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has the greatest concentration of energy poverty in the world with 633 million lacking access to electricity; 70% of the population, 637 million people, live on less than $2 per day; about 792 million people (80%) cook with dirty fuels contributing to air pollution which accounts for over 700,000 deaths in the region each year.
The energy infrastructure in Zambia is under immense stress as droughts caused by climate change continue to pose serious threats to energy security (in 2015 - 2016, the country faced one of the worst situations in 30 years, with dire consequences for the energy sector). Zambia’s energy infrastructure is predominantly hydroelectric (the Kariba Dam supplies around 1,626 MW of power to most parts of the country), making it more sensitive and vulnerable to climate change events such as rainfall variability.
Our Scalable Clean Cooking improves health outcomes by replacing polluting fuels like charcoal and firewood, reducing respiratory illnesses caused by indoor air pollution, particularly among women and children. Our vision is to empower local communities through training and capacity-building, enabling them to repair, maintain, and implement the product locally, creating jobs throughout the supply chain and contributing to the economic growth of rural communities.
