TECHNOLOGY
“ The aim is to create efficient and dynamic local energy markets that empower households and encourage solar entrepreneurism ”
— Dr Sebastian Groh , Managing Director ME SOLshare
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Neufeld stresses that Alpha won ’ t be restricting its efforts to urban or rural areas . “ We ’ re looking at a very broad spectrum . When we look at energy assets it ranges from extraordinarily remote to very central areas where the grid is just very unreliable .” Neufeld admits that bringing renewable energy solutions to both urban and rural areas across multiple countries presents a mixture of regulatory , logistical and cultural difficulties . The three main difficulties Alpha faces are , she lists : supplying new technology in a diverse regulatory environment , turning innovation into solutions at a country-level scale and “ also developing a universal approach that also needs to be very customisable . That ’ s probably our biggest challenge ,” she says . “ We want to take on something that ’ s high-level , in the sense that we know clean energy has challenges with intermittency , storage and distribution . That ’ s global ; that ’ s a physics challenge . How do we take that solution and contextualise it into different economic statuses and
MARCH 2019