On September 20, the U.S. Department of Energy announced former 2022 Westly Prize Winner Illu as a winner of the American-Made Solar Prize and a $200k award for their software. Illu continues to develop worldwide as they partner with organizations in their mission to provide access to renewable energy for remote communities.
Co-founders Sierra Fan and Natasha Allen were inspired to develop Illu after spearheading the development of a solar microgrid in rural Myanmar. Allen emphasizes the driving mission behind this work, stating, “Access to energy is incredibly fundamental to all aspects of development, including health, education, and employment outcomes. However, roughly 800 million people around the world lack access to electricity and remain in the dark.”
The Kan Byin microgrid provided first time 24-hour access to electricity to a community of over 250 families in the remote village and spurred the development of 16 new businesses within the first year of operations. This transformative impact of Distributed Renewable Energy (DREs) on an off-grid community and the challenges they faced through the implementation process inspired Fan and Allen to develop Illu.
Fan and Allen discuss the lack of software solutions that address the needs for teams installing and servicing DREs, noting that field work is difficult to manage when team members are being dispatched to remote sites, and technicians often don’t have the support and information they need on site to make sure the work is done successfully. Fan notes that existing field service management solutions such as Salesforce and ORACLE are often inflexible for teams with diverse operational needs, and also don’t allow teams to share detailed work instructions to help technicians understand exactly what needs to be done. Allen continues, stating, “It’s no surprise then how 90% of DRE sites experience technical complications within their first year of operations, often due to preventable causes.”
In order to address these issues, Fan and Allen developed Illu to streamline all field work for DREs. Serving as both a knowledge base and command center, Illu supports energy security and access for remote populations. Fan also highlights the role that knowledge aggregation played while developing Illu, stating, “There’s so much knowledge that’s locked away in the heads of field technicians, whether that’s in the U.S. or some particularly experienced technician in the Philippines that’s just not getting out there, and it’s really difficult to manage that knowledge transfer. I think part of our work is to make it easy for that knowledge to be aggregated.” By creating remote workflows that combine work instructions, data collection, and documentation, Illu drastically simplifies knowledge transfer to field technicians and makes renewable work more accessible and inclusive.
Illu launched its Android app in November 2021 and is now used in 6 different countries around the world including: the U.S., Nigeria, India, Myanmar, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Thus far, Illu has helped keep the lights on for 15,000 people, working notably with the Footprint Project across the U.S. in deploying solar trailers for disaster reliefs such as the California wildfires and Louisiana hurricanes. Illu is partnering with the Africa Minigrid Developers Association to bring best practices to their members in order to ensure reliable performance of their incorporated microgrids.
The Association released a report in July 2022 stating that these microgrids now provide some of the most reliable and stable electricity on the continent, averaging <1 outage per month, >75% fewer than national grids. Furthermore, Illu is continuing their original mission to support energy access efforts in Myanmar through their ongoing partnership with Indigo Energy, helping manage maintenance and quality control of Indigo’s solar and microgrids installations across the country.
In its next phase, Illu will focus on making it simpler for people to onboard on their platform completely independently, including providing a fulsome library of template workflows and a swatch of additional features across desktop and mobile applications. Aggregating and making accessible critical know-how around DREs remains the priority for Illu, Allen states, “We’re partnering with organizations that are focused on workforce development, capacity building, and initial training of different field workers to develop the content and make sure that it’s keeping up with best practices and keeping up with the needs of the sectors that we’re serving.”
