EGG-energy has been created to implement its founders vision: provide clean, affordable, reliable and safe power to low-income households in the developing world. Created in 2009, EGG-energy connects its client to electricity via a subscription service. Currently, electricity is delivered to customers' homes via a battery that can power three lights, a radio and a cell-phone for up to five nights. This battery is charged in one of our network's charging station and, when depleted, can easily be swapped for a charged one close to their homes, thanks to the numerous distribution agreements that we have passed with local entrepreneurs. Once this distribution network is scaled up, we plan to present our customers with access to larger sources of electricity. However, to build the grid from the bottom-up, we first need to build a strong relationship with a large customer basis. Starting in Tanzania, that's what we're currently working on!
In summer 2008, Jamie Yang, who was graduating from MIT with a PhD in quantum computation and Blandine Antoine, then a 1rst year PhD student in the Engineering Systems Division who, right before coming to MIT, had completed a world tour aimed at identifying energy innovations in 17 countries including a few developing ones, started talking about what it would take to bring electricity to sub-Saharan Africa.
Having set their mind on setting up a distribution business for solar panels in Eastern Africa, they reached out to the MIT community to build their team (then called EggTech) and were soon joined by Rhonda Jordan, whose dissertation studies the Tanzanian power grid, Jukka Valimaki, a Sloan MBA with an entrepreneurial spirit, Mark Yen, an EECS undergraduate who had worked with D-Lab, and a young EECS graduate student whom they had met at the MIT IDEAS generator but ended up leaving their team to focus on his studies.
January 2009 - Upon Jukka's completion of a quick market survey with discouraging results in Tanzania, our team realizes that even small solar panels are too expensive for our target market. We need to find a better solution. Brainstorming caps are put back on, in a team now grown to include three Harvard business (and policy) students: Alla Jezmir, Benjamin Lambert and Emmanuel Cassimatis.
Jamie then remembered a friend of his, operating a health clinic in Uganda, complaining that even though she might manage to secure a grid connection from the power line running in her backyard for the clinic, she would never be able to help get that power distributed to neighboring villages. Power provision (and lack thereof) is not all about adequate power generation - a huge piece of the problem is setting up an effective distribution infrastructure. In countries where public funding is limited for even these necessary large scale infrastructure, we thought that a private company could provide much needed electricity distribution to a large population, as long as it found a way to build the grid step by step, providing electricity "quantum by quantum".
Instead of transporting electricity through power lines, we'd package it in portable and sturdy batteries. Along with the fact that, in Tanzania, 80% of the population lives within 5 km of the power grid, but only 12% of the population has access to electricity, this was the basis on which we put together a business plan aimed at building the grid from the bottom up.
We tested our idea by participating in several business plan competitions, a few of which we won or finished among the finalists (including MIT IDEAS Yunus Challenge, HBS business plan competition, Ignite Clean Energy etc) and raised the funds necessary to perform a field study complete with focus group and market survey in Summer 2009. Having received the financiary support of a business angel, we launched our pilot in November 2009 and have been successfully operating it since then. We plan to open 7 new sites in 2011.
CEO Jamie Yang has been living and supervising operations in Tanzania since June 2009. He is supported by a team of employees locally hired, EGG-energy fellows who spend 6-12 months working for EGG in Tanzania, and a US-based board of directors, active with fund-raising, communication and brand management.
MIT Founders:
Jamie Yang, Quantum Computing within course 22, PhD 2008
Blandine Antoine, PhD candidate in ESD, currently a 4th year student
Rhonda Jordan, PhD candidate in ESD, currently a 4th year student
Jukka Valimaki, MBA Sloan 2010
Mark Yen, EECS 2011
Non-MIT Founders:
Alla Jezmir, dual MPA HKS / MBA HBS 2010
Benjamin Lambert, dual MPA HKS / MBA HBS, 2010
Emmanuel Cassimatis, HBS 2010
Website - http://www.egg-energy.com
Blog - http://egg-energy.com/from-the-field/
Email - info@egg-energy.com
Other - https://marketplace.unreasonableinstitute.org/ventures/view/9/EGG-energy
