Tesla-backed startup launches microgrid powering 2 African villages
ZOLA Electric, a Tesla-backed company providing energy to remote African villages through solar and batteries, has announced the deployment of a new microgrid system that is powering 1,000 homes, schools, and businesses in two villages in Rwanda.
We reported on ZOLA Electric back in 2015 when it was still called Off Grid Electric.
At the time, it was a Tanzania-based startup offering solar power and energy storage as a service to rural regions of Africa.
It got on our radar when SolarCity led two early rounds of financing of $16 million and $25 million for the company alongside a Tesla investor, DBL Partners, and SolarCity’s CEO at the time, Lyndon Rive, joined the company’s board.
By acquiring SolarCity in 2016, Tesla will become a major shareholder of ZOLA Electric, and it looks like Tesla hasn’t divested since the company still promotes itself as being “backed by Tesla.”
ZOLA’s approach is similar to Tesla Energy with Powerwalls and solar power, but it utilizes much smaller battery packs and solar panel systems to reduce the cost of deployment and power impoverished communities.
This was the company’s original system:
It was enough to power some lights at night, a radio, and allow a family to charge some appliances and devices, such as phones.
Over the last few years, the company has managed to grow quite fast, and now it has deployed battery systems and solar panels that power “over 1.5 million people and more than 300,000 homes and businesses.”
Recently, ZOLA has moved to a more robust and powerful system called INIFITY:
Today, ZOLA announced that it has deployed its INFINITY system to power a new “mini grid” in two villages in Rwanda:
The groundbreaking mini-grid project, installed in the agricultural villages of Gakagati I and II in Nyagatare, Rwanda – the country’s largest and second most-populous district – will deliver clean, affordable, reliable power via ZOLA’s innovative INFINITY technology, to over 1,000 homes, businesses, schools and clinics.
The project was completed over 10 months and financed by Facebook, the Shell Foundation, USAID, and Endev, and supported by NXT Grid.
The system deployed in Gakagati has a 120 kW capacity, but ZOLA says that it is modular and easy to expand. It expects to double the capacity to 240 kW over time.
Many villages that lack access to power, or where it is unreliable and expensive, have struggled to grow economically because of this. ZOLA believes that its solar and battery-powered microgrid approach allows access to power at a lower cost, and it can gradually scale with communities as they learn to use the power to help lift themselves out of poverty.
Interestingly, Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted back in 2016, after Tesla launched its own battery and solar-powered energy division, that some developing countries would skip the traditional grid altogether and go straight to microgrids:
The advantage of solar and batteries is that you can avoid building electricity plants at all. So you can be in a remote village and have solar panels that charge a battery pack that then supply power to the whole village without ever having to run thousands of miles of high-voltage cables all over the place. It’s like what happened with landline phones versus cellular phones. In a lot of developing countries, they just didn’t do the landline phones. They went straight to cellular.
It appears that these two villages in Rwanda are an example of that.
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Environment
Elon Musk Tapped to Lead New ‘DOGE’ Department—Despite the Government Already Having One for Efficiency
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is to officially join Trump’s administration as the co-head of the new US Department of Government Efficiency – a second federal department with the goal of making government spending more efficient.
You can’t get more ironic than that.
Throughout the elections, Musk, who is already CEO of Tesla, and SpaceX, a well as the defacto head of X, xAI, Neuralink, and the Boring Company, has been floating the idea to add to his workload by joining the Trump’s administration to lead a new department aimed at making the federal government more efficient.
He has been calling it the “Department of Government Efficiency”, which spells out ‘DOGE’, a meme that Musk appears to enjoy.
Well, now Trump appears to want to be going through with this idea.
He announced the new department and Musk as head, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, in a statement today:
I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”). Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the “Save America” Movement. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” stated Mr. Musk.
What’s most ironic is that there’s already a federal department with the goal of cutting government waste and ensuring efficiency: the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The GAO’s main objectives are:
- auditing agency operations to determine whether federal funds are being spent efficiently and effectively;
- investigating allegations of illegal and improper activities;
- reporting on how well government programs and policies are meeting their objectives;
- performing policy analyses and outlining options for congressional consideration;
- issuing legal decisions and opinions;
- advising Congress and the heads of executive agencies about ways to make government more efficient and effective
It sounds similar to what Musk described when talking about his DOGE, but Trump hasn’t gone into many details other than it will “cut waste.”
He also has a confusing message as he compares the initiative, which is supposed to cut government spending, to “The Manhattan project”, a massive and expensive government project.
Trump said that DOGE will help the government “drive large scale structural reform”:
It will become, potentially, “The Manhattan Project” of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of “DOGE” for a very long time. To drive this kind of drastic change, the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.
The statement also noted that DOGE will only operate until July 4, 2026.
Musk has previously claimed that he could cut at least $2 trillion dollars of the $6.5 trillion dollar US federal budget.
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A pump jack in Midland, Texas, US, on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024.
Anthony Prieto | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oil prices may see a drastic fall in the event that oil alliance OPEC+ unwinds its existing output cuts, said market watchers who are predicting a bearish year ahead for crude.
“There is more fear about 2025’s oil prices than there has been since years — any year I can remember, since the Arab Spring,” said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at OPIS, an oil price reporting agency.
“You could get down to $30 or $40 a barrel if OPEC unwound and didn’t have any kind of real agreement to rein in production. They’ve seen their market share really dwindle through the years,” Kloza added.
A decline to $40 a barrel would mean around a 40% erasure of current crude prices. Global benchmark Brent is currently trading at $72 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures are around $68 per barrel.
Oil prices year-to-date
Given that oil demand growth next year probably won’t be much more than 1 million barrels a day, a full unwinding of OPEC+ supply cuts in 2025 would “undoubtedly see a very steep slide in crude prices, possibly toward $40 a barrel,” Henning Gloystein, head of energy, climate and resources at Eurasia Group, told CNBC.
Similarly, MST Marquee’s senior energy analyst Saul Kavonic posited that should OPEC+ unwind cuts without regard to demand, it would “effectively amount to a price war over market share that could send oil to lows not seen since Covid.”
However, the alliance is more likely to opt for a gradual unwinding early next year, compared to a full scale and immediate one, the analysts said.
Should the producers group proceed with their production plan, the market surplus could nearly double.
Martoccia Francesco
Energy strategist at Citi
The oil cartel has been exercising discipline in maintaining its voluntary output cuts, to the point of extending them.
In September, OPEC+ postponed plans to begin gradually rolling back on the 2.2 million barrels per day of voluntary cuts by two months in an effort to stem the slide of oil prices. The 2.2 million bpd cut, which was implemented over the second and third quarters, had been due to expire at the end of September.
At the start of this month, the oil cartel again decided to delay the planned oil output increase by another month to the end of December.
Oil prices have been weighed by a sluggish post-Covid recovery in demand from China, the world’s second-largest economy and leading crude oil importer. In its monthly report released Tuesday, OPEC lowered its 2025 global oil demand growth forecast from 1.6 million barrels per day to 1.5 million barrels per day.
The pressured prices were also conflagrated by a perceivably oversupplied market, especially as key oil producers outside the OPEC alliance like the U.S., Canada, Guyana and Brazil are also planning to add supply, Gloystein highlighted.
Bearish year ahead for oil
The market consensus is that there’ll be a “substantial” oil stock build next year, said Citibank energy strategist Martoccia Francesco.
“Should the producers group proceed with their production plan, the market surplus could nearly double… reaching as much as 1.6 million barrels per day,” said Francesco.
Even if OPEC+ doesn’t unwind the cuts, the future ofl prices is still looking break. Citi analysts expect Brent price to average $60 per barrel next year.
Further fueling the bearish outlook is the incoming administration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, whose return is associated by some with a potential trade war, said analysts who spoke to CNBC.
“If we do get a trade war — and a lot of economists think that a trade war is possible, and particularly against China — we could see much, much lower prices,” said OPIS’ Kloza.
Trump has also touted a “drill baby drill” policy for U.S. producers, vowing to cut energy prices in half.
For that to happen to retail gasoline prices, oil would need to drop to “below $40” per barrel, said Matt Smith, Kpler’s lead oil analyst.
Right now, retail gasoline prices are at a “sweet spot” at $3 per gallon, where consumers do not feel the pinch and input prices are still sufficiently high for producers, Smith added.
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