EnAccess at the Open Source Summit Europe 2023 with LF Energy and the Linux Foundation

#openenergyaccess
Vivien Barnier and Clara Donadello recently represented The EnAccess Foundation at the LF Energy Foundation Open Source Summit in Bilbao, Spain. They loved getting the chance to meet so much of the #opensource community face to face, so we put together a video that both reflects the great time they had meeting folks and our main takeaways from the 2-day event.
There's been a long-standing narrative that the “Energy Industry” and the #energyaccess sector are incredibly different from each other, that we do totally different things for different reasons, and we have little in common. To be transparent, this was also our internal narrative that we've been challenging more and more in the past few years.
Because honestly: it's not true - or at least it's not that black and white. And the more we talked about this very simple idea to our friends in the Energy Access sector, the more we realized that it hasn't been true for a long time.
The Energy Industry is in a transformative moment - developed markets all over the world are transitioning (too slowly, but that's a different topic) from fossil fuel to renewable energy like solar and wind. And those developed markets often have massive amounts of government money, subsidies for customers and businesses, and public policy that dictates the "transformation" that utility companies are obligated to make. And yes, this is where it starts to feel like a different word when we talk about “the energy access sector” - which is those of us who work to bring energy to customers that don’t have access at all to any sort of grid-based energy. In our sector, we don't have the same financial resources or government incentives.
However, the customers that are being served by solar home systems and mini grids and mesh grids and all sorts of Distributed Renewable Energy *are also part of the energy transition*. Customers that are now receiving energy from a mini-grid in a rural village also transitioned from “dirty” energy sources like kerosene lamps or fuel-burning generators. We are all part of the energy transition, no matter where we live.
And we all need the technology and the tools that deliver energy to our houses to work well. We need the technology to push us forward, not hold us back - and this is why Open Source is key to achieving faster universal energy access. Thank you to LF Energy for seeing this as clearly as we do, and inviting us for a speaking role at this years Open Source Summit! We look forward to Energy Access being represented more and more as part of the global energy transition to safe, clean, renewable energy.
If you spot yourself the video and we didn't tag you, let us know!