Off-grid urban service provision: wellbeing and sustainability

The final webinar in the current Regional Energy Learning Alliance webinar series is on 13^th May 2021 at 2pm GMT. Our international panel of guest speakers – Drs Jiska De Groot and Norman Mathebula, University of Cape Town and Professor Federico Caprotti, University of Exeter - will present on “Off-grid urban service provision: wellbeing and sustainability”.

Off-grid informal urban spaces are often conceptualised, and treated in practice contexts, as disconnected from the formal grid, and from more formal areas of the city. At the same time, these spaces are subject to constraints (usually regulatory and legal) that mean that formal connections are desired in policy and on the ground, but not deliverable in practice. In this presentation, we present our Energy4Wellbeing project, that has focused on an experimental approach to providing off-grid solar infrastructures to part of an informal settlement community in Cape Town. We will also be offering some commentary on thinking about off-grid spaces, and the formal grid, in ways that move beyond a single service focus, and beyond a focus on the purely technical, by highlighting how experimental approaches can be linked to themes such as wellbeing, and sustainable business models.