 Well, hello everyone good afternoon. Good evening or good morning depending on whether you're joining us from today. Welcome to engineering for change or E for C for short today. We're pleased to bring you this month's installment of our 2018 webinar series on the topic of energy access and requirements of rural communities. My name is Yonah Randa, and I'm president here at engineering for change. I'll be serving as your moderator for today. The webinar you're participating in today will be our course on our webinars page and also on our YouTube channel. Both of the URLs for those channels is listed on the slide information on upcoming webinars is available in our webinar page. You first, the members will receive invitations to upcoming webinars directly if you have any questions, comments and recommendations for future topics and speakers. Please contact the E for C webinar series team at webinars at engineering for change.org. If you're following us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with the hashtag before see webinars before we move on to our presenter. I'd like to tell you a bit about engineering for change is a knowledge organization and global community of more than 1 million engineers, designers, development practitioners and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges may include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture and more. We invite you to become a member membership is free and provide access to news and thought leadership insights on hundreds of essential technologies in our solutions library, professional development resources and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships and more. If you see members also enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with the E for C site, the better we will be able to serve you resources aligned to your interest and I know. So today's webinar is the first in a series of webinars related to awkward energy solution. Additional topics covered in the series are drawn from the book titled awkward energy systems and developing countries, which is authored by our presenter, Dr. Henry Louie will be announcing future webinars in this series via our newsletter. You first, the members will receive the information directly in their inbox. So you should be seeing the list of the other webinars on the slide in front of you. For reference, you can find examples of awkward energy products like the mobile solar home system in the solution library. There you can learn more about technical performance standard academic research and user provision models for these types of systems. All of the information in the solution library source community of experts and it is available to you for the members free of charge. A few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's practice using the WebEx platform together by telling us where in the world you are in the chat window, which is located to the bottom right hand of your screen. Please type in your location. If the chat window is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon at the bottom of the screen around the middle of the slide. I can get us started. All right, I see. There we go. We have some folks from Florida for Savannah. Very nice. Okay, Colorado. Thank you everyone. Please do type in your locations. I see some of you are typing in your answers into the Q and a window for any questions you have for our presenter. If you do not see the Q and a window, which is located below the chat, please click that Q and a icon in the bottom of the screen around the middle of the slide. So I see folks typing in. Thank you so much. We have folks from Florida, from India, from Arizona. Fantastic. Welcome everyone. We're so pleased to have you all join us. So if you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. You first see webinars qualify engineers for one professional development hour. To request your PH, please follow the instructions on the top of our professional development page. Or you can also click this on your member dashboard. All of the information is there, including all of the webinars that you have participated in are tracked there. That's it. Thank you so much. We have more folks from Oregon, from Michigan, from Cairo. Fantastic. Thank you for joining us. Professor and for, for Francis would undoubtedly research chair in the department. His research areas include electricity access and developing communities, renewable energy and appropriate technology. He's the president and co-founder of killer walks for humanity. A nonprofit organization providing electricity access and business opportunities in sub Saharan Africa. Dr. Louie served as a full bright scholar to pop up about the university in Kitwa, Zambia. He is recognized as a distinguished lecture of the IEEE and is an associate editor journal for sustainable development. He's the author of the books that I mentioned earlier, upgrade electrical systems. So excited to have Dr. Louie here. He's been a friend and a colleague and a collaborator with engineering for change for a number of years. And we are thrilled to learn more about this topic today. So I pass it over to you, Dr. Louie. Well, it's great to be giving this webinar. I've been involved with engineering for change for a number of years now, going back to its early days. So it's fantastic to be giving it a webinar. Today's webinar will be talking about access and requirements of people living in rural communities. And I think this topic should be of interest to you if you are in the area of energy access, be it cook stoves or off-grid electrification. I'm definitely coming at it from the off-grid electrification viewpoint. That's really my background. But I think if you are looking at improved cook stoves or biomass use, then this will also offer something for you. My background really is in electrical engineering. That's my expertise. And if you look at the organizations that I really owe a lot of thanks to for not only writing the book, but my background, Seattle University. That's where I presently teach. We're a Jesuit university, so I'm often encouraged and supported in ways to look for ways where my research interests. Another organization that's very important is IEEE Smart Village. This is an organization within IEEE that looks to empower entrepreneurs in developing countries that want to basically run micro utilities. I've also founded a nonprofit organization called Killawatts for Humanity, and we do off-grid electrification. And if you want to know more about us, you can just look us up on the web at www.killawattsforhumanity.org. And then finally, the U.S. Fulbright program has also supported my work. Most recently, I spent a year in Zambia as a Fulbright scholar in Kitway. So today's webinar is really drawn from my book, which was published this summer. And you can find a link to it on my website, drhenrylui.com. It's also available through Springer's website. That's the publisher. If your organization has access to your link, you should be able to access it for free. You can purchase it on Amazon via Kindle or as a hard copy, and it retails for about $100 hard copy and about $80. So if you look at the book, there are 14 chapters, and the webinar today is going to be talking about really the first two of those chapters. So energy and human development and energy poverty. And you can see the rest of the book really focuses on technical aspects of off-grid electrification. But again, I think it's very important that we begin by grounding ourselves in what the present energy situation is. In many of the communities that you might hope to serve. The book also has many examples, problems, and certainly a more in-depth treatment than what I'll be able to get into this morning. So why do we care about energy use? Well, energy use is very closely linked to human development. There's many studies that have shown that linkage. But I think if you're going to plan any sort of intervention or project where you're trying to increase or enhance energy access, you really need to understand the starting point, what's going on in that community presently, how they access energy, what their uses are, what their needs and desires are, and the resources within the community. I think history is perhaps littered with many examples of energy projects that didn't work out the way they intended because they failed to account for the present needs in that community. So the learning outcomes for today's webinar are shown here. We're going to talk a little bit about energy poverty and offer a definition of it. We'll certainly discuss the linkage between energy consumption and human development and also trends of energy consumption. We're going to understand the needs of rural communities. And we're going to actually look at some of the field commonly encountered in rural communities and better understand why they're used and how they're used. And then we're going to articulate the factors that really influenced fuel choice in rural communities. And then we're going to talk about ways of describing electricity access and there are several ways of doing that. So if we take a moment and we think about how we use energy, we use it for several applications, cooking, space heating, water heating and so forth being very basic energy uses. And we might even use energy for lucky for communication, information, entertainment and even air conditioning. In rural communities, the needs are the same, but how they actually go about fulfilling the needs is very different than in many western countries. And some of these needs aren't quite fully met. So today's topic is definitely rooted in rural communities. And there's no strict definition of what a rural community is, but just so we're all on the same page, I'll offer these typical factors or characteristics of rural communities. They generally have a decentralized population. They're generally geographically isolated. And they tend to be underserved not only in terms of access to energy, but healthcare, education, clean water, sanitation and other services. In addition, they're usually unable to participate in more regional or even national markets. So in a real sense, there's some isolation there. Now in rural communities, they're often energy impoverished as well. And a good definition of energy poverty is simply the lack of access to modern fuels. And modern fuels, when we think about modern fuels, we generally think of things like electricity or propane or natural gas, that type of fuel. So if you're energy impoverished, generally speaking, overall you consume a lower amount of energy than folks that aren't energy impoverished. You might rely more on human and animal power for mechanical tasks like preparing a field or harvesting crops. And you're going to devote a considerable amount of your time to procuring and processing your fuel. And it's also going to take a large portion of your income. It might take maybe 30% of your income to meet your energy needs. Now worldwide, there are about 2.5 billion people that rely on solid biomass for cooking and heating and then over a billion who don't have access to electricity. So we're going to focus a lot on access to electricity. Now of those 1.1 billion people, approximately 56% live in Africa. So it's about 600 million people that don't have access to electricity living in sub-Saharan Africa. And South Asia would be the other geographic area of the world that really struggles with electricity access. But I'll point out that it's not just so-called developing countries that struggle with this. Even in the United States where I live, there are pockets of people that really don't have access to the grid. One example being parts of the Navajo reservation in the United States, their off-grid. Now it's maybe not surprising that people who don't have access to electricity are generally found in rural areas. So there's a rural penalty associated with electricity access. And worldwide, you are far more likely to be energy impoverished if you live in a rural area than in an urban area. But we still shouldn't forget that there are perhaps 100 million people or more that live in urban areas that are not connected to the grid. And then there's many that live underneath the grid. They can actually see the grid, the power lines bypassing them going over their house. So it remains a challenge even in the urban context, although we're not going to get into that in this webinar. It's discussed in more detail in the book. So overall, you'll often hear about something called the electrification rate. And the electrification rate is defined as the population, the percent of the population who has access to electricity at their house. There's several criticisms to this metric, which we'll get into later. But for now, this is understood as the percent of the population who has electricity to their house. And you can see that globally, the electrification rate has been rising over the past 20 years or so. And it presently sits around 85 or 86 percent. So 85 or 86 percent of the world has access to electricity at their home. But of course, there's a wide variation on a country by country basis. Countries like Chad and South Sudan will have less than 10 percent of their households electrified. And many of these countries are founded in Sub-Saharan Africa. Now, despite this overall low electrification rates, globally we've actually seen an increase in electricity consumption. So overall, in the past, since going back to about 1970, we've increased our per-person electricity consumption considerably. So I'll make the distinction here that right now I'm talking about electricity and not energy, not total energy. So this is only electricity component. And this is attributed to countries like China and India who are rapidly industrializing and developing. And you can see that their consumption has rapidly increased. In countries like the United States and Germany, for example, our per-person electricity use is actually stagnated if not declined somewhat over the last decade or so. But the story is very different in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's not rapidly increasing. In fact, the per-person electricity consumption today is about what it was in 1980. So, you know, almost 40 years and the per-person electricity consumption really hasn't changed. It's gone up and down over the years, but we're back where we're at in 1980. And this is largely due to a failure to invest in electrical infrastructure but also a very rapidly expanding population in many countries. Now, we can look at not just electricity consumption but energy consumption and see the story that it tells. So it also has increased globally since the 1970s for sure, increasing by about 43% over the time period shown here. And it's important, just an important number to keep in mind is that the average per-person consumption is about 80 gigajoules. So 80 gigajoules per person per year, which is about 22 megawatt hours. So this is if you take the total energy consumed worldwide and divide it by the population. But of course, within any individual country, there's some wide variation in the per-person use. So Canada, for example, with its relatively cold climate, they actually will use quite a bit of energy. So in Canada, they might use about 50 times the amount of energy per person than in Niger. So again, these are per-person statistics, not total. So the population has already been accounted for. Now, we can examine this inequality in a different way. On the slide that you see in front of you, we have plotted the Human Development Index and the per-person energy use. And the units have changed to megawatt hours per person per year. But what we see here is that as we increase, as countries have and people have more access to electricity, they are able to reinvest it in ways that improve their Human Development Index. The Human Development Index, if you're not familiar with it, is a metric that was developed by the United Nations that accounts for the well-being of a country, and it really just looks at three things actually. It looks at health, education, and the economics of that country, and gives you a number usually between zero and one. So the closer to one you are, the higher, the more developed you are according to the Human Development Index. So countries with more consumption tend to have higher Human Development Indexes, and those that have low consumption or low access to electricity generally have low Human Development Indexes. Now, if we think about the last slide and that 80 gigajoules per person per year, that's the global average. And if we convert that to megawatt hours, we get something like 22. So that's what that red vertical line is. And so you can imagine that's the global average sitting there. And so if everyone, if we were able to redistribute that energy equally amongst all people on the earth, we might end up with the Human Development Index somewhere between 0.7 and maybe 0.9, which would be a comfortable standard of living for sure. And so you could argue that the real problem of all of this isn't that we don't have enough sources of energy, it's just the distribution of energy is not equitable. And so you have countries that really struggle while you have other countries that the incremental benefit perhaps isn't as great as it could be. We're going to drill down now and look at what happens in rural communities. And so you can take the community needs, the energy needs of a rural community, and you can break it into really free areas, community services, productive uses, and for households. So we're going to start by looking at energy use of community services. So when we talk about community services, we're really talking about healthcare facilities, schools, maybe places of worship, government facilities, and so forth. So we also will consider path-winding to be a community service. So all of these usually have some need or some desire at least for access to electricity. If we look at the statistics globally, it's actually quite shocking. You know, four out of five schools in Africa lack access to electricity, and globally it's about 200 million children that attend school without electricity. On the left-hand side of the screen, you'll see the electrification rates when calculated for schools and health clinics. And you can see in some countries the electrification rate of schools is astonishingly low. Now I think providing electricity to schools and hospitals also has a very important indirect benefit. Some research has shown that teachers are more likely to want to stay in urban areas if their rural assignments are in places that don't have access to electricity and water. So by improving the infrastructure of the schools and the health clinics, you're more likely to attract teachers and healthcare workers there. So there's these indirect benefits that I think are very important. We're going to look next at the energy use of schools. Typically the electricity needs of schools in rural areas would be for Internet telecommunications and computers. That's the so-called ITC. But also lighting and certainly there's room for advanced teaching technologies like projectors and printers and so forth. I'll note that in most of the schools that I've been to in rural areas they're actually designed to make good use of lighting. So it's not so much lighting during the day, that's the problem. It's having light in the evening for example evening classes and sometimes in the early morning. In many of these schools you'll find computers. This is a picture that I took in Zambia and I was in a school that was about 20 kilometers from the grid. I asked the headmaster, why do you have a computer here? He said, well it's to teach computer literacy. Computer literacy is on the national government exams in Zambia. Each school should have a computer so that they can teach computer literacy. This computer I'm quite sure has never been turned on. There's no electricity at all nearby. So you run into things like that in rural areas. If we look at healthcare facilities they have the same lighting and ITC needs. In fact their lighting needs are perhaps more pressing in case there's some sort of emergency in the middle of the night. But they also need electricity to run the diagnostic equipment and different machines for healthcare. One important application is refrigeration for vaccines and medicines. You can see there is a picture of a vaccine, this is a solar powered vaccine refrigerator. So it's very important to keep the vaccines and medicines within a very narrow band of temperatures. So if you or your organization is seeking to do this sort of thing, provide electricity to a health clinic, you have to make sure that it is reliable. I've also shown a table of the typical energy use and peak power need of healthcare facilities. Which are of course important pieces of information for any design. The next sector of energy use in rural communities is productive uses. So by productive uses we're talking about uses that can be used, energy uses that generate income. And when we think about electricity uses in that context, we're talking about electricity for pumping, primarily for irrigation. For milling, agriculture and forest product processing. In addition, small businesses like barbershops and video halls have electricity needs as well. With electric lighting it's easier to stay to extend your business hours. And then of course there's refrigeration. So what I've shown on this screen here is a 15 kilowatt off-grid hammer mill station in Zambia. And so they use that for processing maize. And so we would definitely classify this as a productive use of electricity. So this is very important to identify productive uses, especially for off-grid electrical systems. Because these are usually the consumers that are willing and able to pay consistently for electricity, which might make your off-grid system viable. So identifying productive users is especially important. And we're really going to focus the rest of this webinar on household needs. So if we look at the energy, not just electricity consumption of off-grid households. The consumption ranges from about 5 to 15 gigajoules per person per year. So that's a range that you should keep in mind, at least in terms of like an order of magnitude of a target that you might look for. And that energy is primarily used for cooking and water and space heating. That's the primary uses for it. Now if we look at a rural household, we're going to find that there's usually several types of fuels in use. And those fuels might range from animal dung and batteries to kerosene and liquid petroleum, with a lot in between. So different households use different types of fuels. You might also find some use of petrol or diesel if they're lucky enough to have a generator. Now an important concept in energy use in rural areas is the energy ladder. And so you can briefly describe the energy ladder as this idea that as households increase their income, they transition from less desirable fuels to more desirable fuels. And a progression perhaps similar to what's shown there on the slide. So a family that had been using fuel would, if they have increased income for whatever reason, they might switch to charcoal. Charcoal burns cleaner and it's easier to use. So this is a good starting point for thinking about the energy use of rural communities. But there's a lot of research and at least anecdotes nowadays that say, well, this is a simplistic version. In fact, many households tend to fuel stack, which means that they use multiple fuels even simultaneously. And they might be very reluctant to abandon fuel even if it's less desirable because of cultural or traditional reasons or also to improve resiliency. So in Zambia where I'm most familiar, I lived in a large city and even in this urban environment where many people had electricity, charcoal use was still very popular. It was a more traditional and familiar way of cooking than using electric cookers. So you would see the stacking of fuel. So obviously there are several factors that ultimately affect the decision to use a particular fuel or not to use a particular fuel. And really you can boil it down to three broad areas. You consider the quality, the convenience and the cost of the fuel. In terms of quality, we usually will decide to use a fuel based upon its efficiency. If its output can easily be controlled. So an example of that would be if you have an electric cooker, it's very easy to calibrate or to adjust the power output of that device. But if you're relying on fuel wood, it's much more challenging to do. In terms of convenience, it has to be locally available and there has to be a reliable supply. So fuel wood fits this convenience quite good for most communities. However, if we think of fuel wood, there's a lot of processing involved that makes it less desirable. And other factors you might consider are, is it easy to use? Is it versatile? Fuel wood is great, but it's a little bit hard to use it for lighting, even though quite a few people do. But it's not so versatile in that regard. You also can't power a television with fuel wood. Safety is, of course, another consideration and also storage requirements. In terms of costs, we're not just looking at the cost of fuel. We find that many of these households is not just the cost of the fuel itself, it's the cost of the associated equipment. If you want to transition to using propane, for example, well, now you have to buy a burner and you might have to buy slightly different cooking equipment. And so there's a cost there. In addition, the stability of the price is important in some countries. The price of kerosene is fixed by the government, so it's a stable price and that increases the desirability of it. And then it's also important to think about whether or not you can purchase very, very small quantities of that fuel. Even if it's more economical to buy in bulk, many rural households don't have dependable income. And so they might have a very, very modest amount of money they can spend on fuel. And so something like kerosene, which you can get in very small amounts, they might prefer that over a different option like propane, they might only be able to buy larger cylinders. So these are all factors that ultimately influence a household's use of a particular fuel. So the next couple of slides, I'm going to show you some statistics or some plots that are drawn from a number of different sources. And they're not trying to be representative of an entire country or an entire area. In fact, one of the important takeaways from this webinar is that no two communities are the same and their use of different fuels is going to vary widely based upon what's available locally, income and so forth. But this nonetheless gives you sort of an idea of the range of fuels that are out there and how they are used. So in most areas, fuel-wood is the dominant source of energy. So you can see on the Y-axis there, it's gigajoules per household per year. So it isn't per person, it's per household. So the numbers are quite larger than the 5 to 15 gigajoules per person that I quoted earlier. But you can see in across these regions, fuel-wood is very important. In Kenya, kerosene seems to be used a lot more. I think in Kenya, the government subsidizes kerosene, at least when this research was done, and so you would actually see a lot more kerosene used. So there's definitely some variation there, but overall fuel-wood is the dominant energy supply. And we can look at this a different way. And again, this is a different set of countries. If we look at the amount of money that is actually spent per fuel source. So here, fuel-wood tends to be actually quite small in terms of the amount of money that a household would spend on it. And that's usually because fuel-wood can be gathered at very low cost or even for free, as is often the case. But instead, we see things like kerosene and batteries eating away a lot of the energy budget of a household. And again, that's because well, kerosene and batteries are expensive. Although a household might not use a lot of energy from kerosene or batteries, the per-unit cost of that energy is quite high. And we would see that the typical expenditure would range from maybe $40 to $140 per household per year, somewhere in that range. And for some of these households who might make $1,000 a year at best, this is a significant portion of their income. And if most development agencies will target maybe 5% or 10% of households' income to be spent on fuel, so it shouldn't exceed that. If you're exceeding that, then you're really taking money away from tuition or medicine or other uses of that money. The use of fuel-wood really depends on where in the world you are. But you can see that it's primary uses for cooking, and then we see some other uses like space heating and so forth. Now to gather fuel, even if it's free, it can be extremely inconvenient. You might have to walk five kilometers or more to find an area to gather fuel, and then you have to return it. And so the collective burden of this on a family might be up to 25 hours per week, which is usually done by women and girls. And so that's time that they could be in school or doing something perhaps more productive. So it's a tremendous burden. And if you look at how much fuel-wood is actually needed, it's usually a few kilograms per person per day. And so it easily adds up to several tons a year depending on the household size. So just imagine if you had to grab that much wood from a location that is five or 10 kilometers away. It would be a tremendous burden on your life. I'm going to talk briefly about kerosene, which is another very important fuel in certainly some countries. And kerosene is primarily used for lighting and maybe starting fires. Although it might account for maybe 10% of the energy use in a household, it might also account for 50% of the amount of money that is spent on fuel in general. So it's quite expensive. Kerosene is also very dangerous and unsafe. In the picture you see to the right, kerosene is being dispensed into a repurposed water bottle. And so kerosene being a clear liquid, you put it in a water bottle. Children will make a mistake and accidentally drink it. And so that's a problem that certainly has been documented. Now I think an interesting thing about kerosene is that because it's so expensive and it's used for lighting, we can actually use that as an entry point for off-grid systems. Solar lanterns and solar home systems can be offered at a low price, at least what they're spending presently on kerosene, and you replace it with a higher quality product. And I think that's really been the catalyst for getting these markets started is you can replace kerosene with very efficient solar lanterns and solar home systems. Now in rural communities there's also a, there's electronic devices that are used. I mean no matter how rural you get, you will find people with battery powered radios and cell phones. So there is a need for electricity there. And this has really stimulated or at least motivated a lot of organizations to look into off-grid systems. But if we do a calculation here, we can see that this maybe isn't the best idea. At least trying to entirely replace the energy need with an off-grid system. So if we take a low value of a per person annual consumption of 5 gigajoules, which is about 1.39 megawatt hours, and let's say you have a, you design an off-grid system that can supply that amount at a cost of about 15 cents a kilowatt hour, which is actually quite low. I think most of the time it's closer to 30 or 40 cents a kilowatt hour if not higher. Then we can do some back of the envelope math and you realize that that person would actually have to spend about $200 a year on that electricity if they were to fully transition or fully replace their present fuel uses with electricity. And this isn't going to be economically viable for the majority of households that you find in rural areas. It's just not going to happen. So an approach that many off-grid organizations are following is instead of a complete replacement, you're targeting applications that electricity can serve especially well or that the alternative fuel like kerosene is particularly undesirable because it's expensive and dangerous. So we're looking at lighting and phone charging and powering radios and televisions. And so if you look at that, you know, a rough figure that you would target would be about one kilowatt hour a household a day. And that of course can scale higher and lower depending upon what services you want to apply. And so what you see is that just naturally occurring the market has come up with a whole range of solutions to supply different levels of electricity access ranging from small solar lanterns that might cost, you know, $10 or $20 all the way up to mini-grids which replicate and even exceed the quality of grid connections. And so within a given community you might target one solution over another based upon that community's present energy system or energy use as well as what you think they might be able to afford. So it's definitely not a one size fits all proposition that we are seeing played out. So to look at it another way, you know, you have different services from lighting to cell phones to radios to even refrigerators and other things. And you would map a solution based upon the services that you want to provide. And more formally here in this table you can divide the services and the power requirements for those services. So things like lighting and communication and entertainment really can be powered with low power or very low power systems, but things like washing machines and water heaters are high power and probably would never be supplied by a solar home system. You would need sort of a mini-grid to be able to do that type of service and power. So I want to return to the electrification rate and offer a couple of criticisms of it. So remember the electrification rate is simply the percentage of people that have access to electricity. So some of the criticisms of the electrification rate is what we call a binary indicator. Somebody has electricity or somebody doesn't. So then it completely ignores the quality of the electricity supply across several dimensions including the reliability of the supply and its availability. So to use one example, the picture on my left is taken at my house when I lived in Zambia and we were technically grid connected. But at the time in Zambia there was load shedding that would last for eight hours every day. So this was actually my wife doing some work when we were load shedding and we had to rely on a battery powered light and her laptop's battery. The gentleman on the right is connected to a mini-grid and because it's not the national grid he wouldn't be counted as having access to electricity even though his electricity was available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So I would be considered to have electricity and he wouldn't according to the electrification rate. So there's obviously some challenges with the electrification rate. So what we see now is several organizations are looking to improve how we talk about and how we measure access to electricity. And this is just one example called the multi-tier framework where they look at these seven indicators and they assign an access here. So that's between zero and five. And so just a couple of examples of what that might look like is for each person that you would survey you would figure out which tier they were in to tier zero through five and you could assign them a tier. So that's for the capacity attribute and here's for example what it would look like for the availability attribute. So there are a few of these types of scales that are in existence today. And I think that's a more holistic way of looking at the electricity access. So in designing an off-grid system then what you might do is you might survey the community to get a better understanding of their actual energy uses and income and so forth. And then you might target a specific tier that you're trying to supply. So you might say well we're going to devise an off-grid system that is tier two or tier three or so forth and then you would use that in the design phase. So that's a critical input. It's as critical understanding the load that you're trying to supply is as critical as understanding the solar resource or the hydro resource in the design phase. So let me just wrap things up here. In summary when we think of energy poverty it's really the lack of access to modern fuels particularly electricity and propane and similar highly desirable fuels. Energy access is definitely a critical enabler of human development. It's really hard to have high income to be healthy and to be well educated if you're energy impoverished. Overall as humanity we are increasing our global energy consumption per person as well as our total consumption but there is very, very wide inequality in the distribution of that energy. As a typical range of household use and energy use in rural areas we see somewhere between 5 and 15 gigajoules a year. And that's really high enough that replacing it with electricity becomes unrealistic in many scenarios. I think at some point we'll be getting there but presently we're not there yet and I think it's maybe foolish to just assume that you'll have an off-grid system that entirely replaces these other fuels as undesirable as they may seem. Household fuels generally use several fuels simultaneously and we call that fuel stacking and it's an important aspect of fuel use. And that fuel use is usually the decision to use one fuel or another really depends upon that fuels quality, convenience and cost in that local context and no two communities are going to be exactly the same. And then I think overall when we describe and talk about electricity access project we really need to use something more than the electricity access rate or the number of households connected. We should also be discussing the quality of the connection. So just a little teaser about what we'll be talking about during the next webinar in the series is grid extension. Now I think it's extremely important to understand grid extension because off-grid systems are competing with grid extension. So we'll talk about the reasons and locations where you might consider an off-grid solution versus simply waiting for the grid to come. We'll talk about the different types of grid extension projects and some of the design. We'll get into a bit of the design aspects. Now this is very relevant to mini-grids as well. The power lines are largely the same between the two of them. We'll talk about economics and ways of describing grid extension projects and terms of cost per connection and so forth. And then we'll talk about where rural electrification programs fit in to off-grid electrification. So there's quite a few references that I went through and you can look at these in more detail when these slides are posted. So that's the end of my presentation. You can contact me with the email shown below or follow me on Twitter. And at this point, if there are any questions, I'm happy to take them. Thank you so much for this really great presentation, Dr. Louie. And we already have a question that's come in and I encourage our attendees to please submit your questions in the Q&A area. So there's a follow-up to what metrics are more holistic better than street electrification rate. If you can please provide us an insight, maybe go back to that slide where you had the dimensions noted. Absolutely. And that's a great question. And I would also practice my response by saying this is a bit of a fluid area. The different frameworks that are coming out are fairly new and the kinks are being worked out and actually doing the measurement aspects of them. So this multi-tier framework was developed by an organization called ESMAP. And they picked these indicators there, these four attributes that are shown, excuse me, these seven attributes that are shown there. So if you just look for ESMAP and multi-tier framework, you'll get the entire document. And in fact, there's actually several multi-tier frameworks that are targeted for household use. So there's a couple of different options that you can use. Now, a drawback of using these more advanced frameworks for quantifying electricity access is that the burden of collecting data also increases. You're not simply asking someone if they have electrical wires going to their house. Now you're asking questions about health and safety and how they pay their bill and how much their electricity bill is. So it's a much more involved process, but I think it's important to do. Otherwise, we can just run power lines to people's houses and not power them and count it as them being electrified, and that doesn't make much sense. So other frameworks that have been developed, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the United States has something called the Quality Assurance Framework that's been developed. And there's a few other organizations that have different ways. They're all fairly similar. They consider similar things, but there are a few that are out there. So I hope that answers your question. Hopefully, I think that was a pretty thorough answer. So if we have no other questions, we are going to wrap up a little early. The nature of the series is meant to go chapter by chapter webinar by webinar to build on the topic as we grow our knowledge here. So we will try to keep these a little bit faster paced than our regular webinars. So with that, I would like to thank our presenter, Dr. Louie. I would like to thank our attendees and encourage you all to join us on the next series in the webinar. And we will post the recording of this webinar on our platform and we'll be following up with information about the full series and then giving you an option to sign up for the full series should you be interested. With that, I wish everyone a good afternoon, good evening. Thank you again for attending.