Excerpted from the ‘GE Look Ahead’ series:

““First has been the improvement of efficiency of LEDs of 10,000% in the past 13 years,” says Russell Sturm, ?head of Climate Change Advisory at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group. “Batteries have improved 90% with the whole revolution around lithium and it’s been a similar trajectory for photovoltaic cells.”

These dramatic cost reductions have led to a quadrupling of installations of solar home systems worldwide between 2002 and 2014—from 1.3m to 5.1m. Bangladesh is a global leader in the field, with more than 2.4m systems installed.

For homes, power sources range from simple solar lamps and solar home kits to microgrids, with several houses in a village connected to a group of solar panels.

“What’s exciting is it’s going to be incremental,” says Shuaib Siddiqui, director of the energy portfolio at Acumen, a nonprofit venture fund with investments in solar and off-grid power companies. “It completely changes the way we think about utilities and power distribution for this income segment.”

Technology is also playing a role. Mobile phones and sensors, for example, have enabled the use of “pay-as-you-go” models to serve remote communities. Customers pay the fee using their mobile phone; if they miss their payments, the system can be shut off remotely. Remote sensors can also monitor changes in demand, allowing companies to send out engineers to repair the system when an unusual drop in demand is identified—or to add solar panels to the microgrid when the system has reached its full capacity.

The above developments are opening new opportunities for governments to push for universal energy access. India, for example, is now betting on solar technology to bring energy to every household by 2019. Meanwhile, as part of its Power Africa initiative, the US is engaged in a $2.8m Off-Grid Energy Challenge to promote innovations that can scale up off-grid energy technologies.”