Nicole Poindexter, 46, a Yale grad and alumni of Harvard's business school, was one of Opower's early employees. She joined the Virginia-based energy utility management giant in early 2010, fours year prior to its initial public offering. Rising quickly through the ranks of Opower's sales division to the position of senior director of global business development, she took an extended leave after the company went public to revaluate life.
A close friend had passed away shortly before the IPO occurred, when Poindexter was working around the clock, plugged into a complex sales operation, which reached across the Atlantic to clients throughout Asia.
The tragedy, however, left a lasting impression; life is finite, do what you love and what you feel is truly important. This revelation led to the eventual creation of Energicity, and subsequently, Poindexter spending roughly 50 to 75 percent of her time in rural villages across Ghana, currently.
"In a given day I might meet government officials and regulators, and go to different parts of the country to meet with village traditional rulers and civic committees to tell them about our services and contract with them. I also spend time with our existing customers listening to them and what their needs are to determine how to improve," she explained.
"We've had some very exciting initial interest."
Poindexter is the founder and CEO of Energicity, an alternative, micro-power grid startup with grand ambitions to change the way rural African communities access and pay for energy usage. The full-time team behind the company sits at three employees: Poindexter, co-founder/VP of operations Joe Philip and solar engineer Richard Arthur, who helps run Energicity's Ghanian subsidiary, Black Star Energy, from Africa.
At the moment, Energicity/Black Star Energy is in the midst of an Indiegogo campaign to raise $22,000 to effectively expand services to new villages in Ghana. They've already raised more than half their crowdfunding goal in just nine days, totaling just north of $10,000. In addition, Poindexter told DC Inno that her business will begin to raise an angel round in January, after the holidays, as well. She previously pitched the idea to investors in Washington, D.C., last month, at an event hosted by law firm, Cooley LLP.
She added, "we've had some very exciting initial interest."
Lights on
Armed with a mission to bring affordable solar energy and electricity to Africa, D.C.-based Energicity is building micro-solar grids specifically for rural villages throughout Ghana. Whether it's product design, hardware installation, the company's cloud software payment platform or some variation of appliance accommodations, Energicity's current business strategy understands and undoubtedly curtails itself to the regional market and environment.
What does that mean, exactly?
In Ghana, the original launch country for Energicity, there has been rapid mobile phone adoption but access to electricity remains a challenge in some parts of the country. That barrier to access, due to years of inadequate infrastructure development in certain rural regions, has led to roughly 25 percent of the population (5 million people) using kerosene as their primary energy source for lighting.
Kerosene is a light fuel that is highly flammable, as it is distilled from petroleum, and can be very dangerous when used in buildings with easily combustible structural materials. Solar energy, on the other hand, is a safe and highly scalable renewable source that remains affordable with the right conditions
The mission is to "provide sustainable, affordable, scalable electricity to people and communities so that they can thrive," said Poindexter.
Unsurprisingly, while the aforementioned growth in mobile phone access and usage across Africa is present, and especially in Ghana, smartphone ownership is low. During the development of a utility payment system, Poindexter and co. needed to take this into account. A smartphone app is simply not an option for this clientele and neither is a mailing address for many.
In creating a product, it's important, across any industry, to account for local customer norms and conditions. As such, Energicity uses an SMS (Short Message Service) messaging tool to notify, receive payments and update customers during their energy usage period. This allows for a level of realtime information to be available. Also of note, paying for phone service in most developing countries is done through scratch cards, similar in appearance to a lottery ticket, with a preregistered activation code. Poindexter said she also plans to employ a similar sales model for access to her company's solar systems in the future.
From simply a product standpoint, Energicity is a two-part organization: part software and part hardware. The hardware side consists of solar panels, supports beams, cable polls, smart utility meters, lead-acid batteries to store the collected energy and the wiring (electrical grid), itself, which transfers energy from storage to home. The majority of these components are developed by Ghanian contractors, Poindexter said, briefly noting how it is important to source locally as much as possible. The solar panels used by Energicity were engineered in-house but manufactured elsewhere.
RealBeam Electrical, a Ghana-based company, is Energicity's official smart-grid partner.
On the software side, everything is developed, updated, serviced and deployed in-house.
"We developed our proprietary operating platform which operates in the cloud for payments, grid operations and customer and rate plan management and we do all of the grid design and engineering. We work with outside contractors to fulfill on different parts of the grid construction," Poindexter said.
The idea of sourcing locally for hardware component construction goes beyond the factory though. In fact, the installation crews, comprised of engineers, carpenters, household architects and masons, among others, are hired directly from surrounding Ghanian communities to do work for Energicity.
"We source locally for several reasons," Poindexter explained. "Our initial thinking was that we were interested in putting wealth back into the communities that we serve. However, it turned out that there were really talented and capable service providers available locally and their local knowledge of resources and customers has been very helpful in making us more effective on the ground and enabling us to build a better product for our customers."
Social entrepreneurship
At the heart of operations, Energicity is what people in the startup space call a social good enterprise. The business obviously has a mission to improve social and/or humanitarian issues, but it also hopes to become a sustainable business, with profits, employees and scalable operations. It's not a charity.
The business model behind Energicity is simple: customers with installed systems pay per Kilowatt hour (kWh) at a fixed daily fee that totals roughly $30 per year or 25 cents per kWh. Importantly, Energicity's solar grids aren't necessarily intended to provide a complete and moreover, full-time alternative to traditional electric sources experienced in developed countries. It's simply not the same system.
Usage + growth
Typical usage for most Black Star Energy customers, to date, is only a few hours a day; for tasks like cooking, reading, listening to a radio, watching a small T.V. and/or communicating at home during the night. Nonetheless, the societal and newly afforded opportunities that electricity provides is substantial, said Poindexter.
Kerosene usage for lighting will likely continue to some degree in these communities but Energicity's solar alternative are curbing and effectively, changing the dynamic.
The majority of Energicity's current clients are coco farmers, Poindexter explained during a phone interview. Many are illiterate, have no formal education, yet "totally get it," she said, because the payment system is similar in nature to what is already experienced with cellphones.
On the pricing for access to solar energy via Energicity, the monthly receipt can vary greatly based on continued usage, the devices that are plugged in and overtime, it is changing based on outside influences, like the growth of the company's operations. A rough approximation goes like this: the $30 yearly price tag covers about enough power for two lights for two hours, to charge cellphones, daily, and for electricity to a 70 watt T.V. for about an hour or so, Poindexter described.
The former Opower executives said that the upfront payment to establish a grid and power a village of about 50 to 200 people can be covered within six years from the day of installation. She declined to name the specific upfront cost due to shifting production costs and differing situations per village. It takes about 3 weeks to establish a micro-grid, Poindexter said, but that process will soon be shortened to average 2 weeks per project.
After another year of steady growth, Poindexter plans to expand Energicity outside of Ghana and into new countries. "[But] to do that we’ll need to build new systems and hire talented software engineers, use data analytics to cut costs and further improve upon our supply chain structure."
Founded in September, Energicity/Black Star Energy is self-funded.
