The Eilat-Eilot Off Grid Hub is developing solutions to bring electricity, clean water to world’s ‘bottom billion’
For Westerners, it’s hard to imagine life without electricity — but that’s the situation for more than a billion people, according to the UN. Besides making lives less convenient in far-flung rural areas and crowded urban slums in the developing countries of Africa and Asia — no electric lights or computers — it means an existence socially and economically worlds away from the 21st century in the West. Now an Israeli firm is working to close the gap by delivering technology.
Products to be developed at the newly created Eilat-Eilot (EE) Off Grid Hub will bring electricity, cooking fuel, and other benefits to the bottom fifth of the world’s population, who have for decades been waiting for a better life.
The technologies developed at the Off Grid Hub, said director Tomer Weinstein, will deliver that power in a much more efficiently — and cheaply — than the governments in those countries would be able to, even if they had the resources to do so, “which they largely don’t,” Weinstein told The Times of Israel.
The Hub will provide start-ups and established companies in the energy, water and agricultural sectors with field testing facilities and a demonstration ecosystem to install, validate and showcase their off grid products and solutions — for example, a biogas system that doesn’t require fuel, said Weinstein. “We have a solution that produces biogas from leftover scraps of food that are too rotten or contaminated to eat, that can power cooking stoves and heating sources.” All that’s needed is a match to light the system, and the biogas processor does the rest, he added.
This article was first published on The Times of Israel. To continue reading this article on the TOI site: click here
