In Kenya, the electric grid is notoriously unreliable. It goes out a lot.
“At least once a day,” says Colin le Duc, a partner at Generation Investment Management, a London-based firm co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore that finances companies pushing towards sustainable solutions. “If you're watching a Champions League soccer game and the grid goes down in the middle of the game, that's not a good outcome.”
Le Duc's firm is trying to avoid that outcome by investing in the Kenyan company M-Kopa, which installs solar panels coupled with lithium-ion batteries. And they’re not just targeting customers who lose power during soccer matches.
“There are obviously areas of Kenya where there is no grid at all. And you have the opportunity to leapfrog directly to a distributed model of clean energy and thereby basically negate the need to build centralized grid systems,” says Le Duc.