Bangladesh hosts the world’s largest collection of off-grid solar energy systems. Rooftop panels and batteries electrify over 4 million households and businesses there. Dhaka-based startup ME SOLshare believes it has the technology to link these systems and foster a solar energy-sharing economy. If the company succeeds, home systems will morph into village minigrids, offering wider access to more power at lower cost.

SOLshare’s European founders—Sebastian Groh, Hannes Kirchhoff, and Daniel Ciganovic—conceived their “swarm electrification” power-sharing platform during grad-school brainstorming sessions in Germany and California. The three moved to Dhaka to define, engineer, and launch their product, starting with power measurements in off-grid solar homes.

What Groh and his cofounders discovered upon arrival in 2015 was plenty of spare power going to waste. Typically, the batteries in home systems are sized to capture the power generated during the relatively dim monsoon season. As a result, during much of the year there is extra power available that isn’t captured. On average, about 30 percent of each system’s potential output is lost.

SOLshare’s technology is designed to share this extra power.  A smart power controller, called a SOLbox, is installed in each home or business and linked with cables to other local SOLboxes to form a DC distribution grid. The SOLbox enables users to set how much power they want to share with or draw from the network, and at what price…

… READ ON AT SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG