Retrospective on Energy as a Service

Matthew Carney - Ross School of Business & School for Environment and Sustainability

Namaste! With my internship now over, it’s a perfect chance to reflect on my summer and how my first year at Michigan led to this opportunity. Like many students, I came to Michigan without a firm idea of where exactly I wanted to go professionally. I knew I wanted to do something in the realm of sustainability, but I struggled to decide which problem I wanted to focus on. Renewable energy? Clean water? Waste? Poverty? Forest degradation? These were all significant areas to focus on, but I still felt like I hadn’t quite scratched my itch.

Thankfully, my vision became clearer as the year wore on and I began to reconsider energy not as a product to be sold - but a service to be provided. Working with institutions like the William Davidson Institute helped me understand that we shouldn’t limit ourselves to thinking that the benefits of renewable energy are realized when the lights turn on. Particularly in emerging markets, new sources of renewable energy can have a significant positive impact beyond reducing carbon emissions.

Subsistence farmers in rural Nepal provide a stark reminder of this fact. These farmers spend hours each day farming their land by hand, and struggle to produce enough crops to feed themselves - much less sell for profit. Additionally, tasks such as irrigating land and grinding crops into flour are extremely manual labor-intensive and incur significant opportunity costs due to how time-consuming they are.

Access to solar-powered mechanization can help these farmers in numerous ways. First, improved agricultural productivity means that farmers can produce more crops with less effort, ensuring they not only have enough food for themselves but also have crops they can sell to earn income. Secondly, reducing the number of manual labor hours needed to tend the farm leaves individuals, particularly women and children, free to pursue other income-generating opportunities. From an environmental perspective, the adoption of modular solar power can also meet these farmers’ needs while reducing the incentive for capital-intensive, environmentally unfriendly electrification infrastructure projects.

Overall, I was very lucky to spend my summer working with a company that helped me see the positive trickle down effects energy access can have in emerging markets. I’m grateful for the experience WDI provided because I know this experience will provide a new lens for how I approach the upcoming year at Ross and my career interests.