Electricity gap: the Nigerian solar battery taking clean energy off grid | What’s next? Ask Toronto

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), about 770 million people still live without electricity across the world, particularly in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa; in Nigeria alone, 85 million people lack access to grid electricity. Many communities are reliant on alternative fuels, such as diesel generators and paraffin lanterns, which are often expensive, inefficient, and sometimes unsafe. For University of Toronto graduate Olugbenga Olubanjo, the challenge of overcoming electricity inequality isn’t just a career passion. It’s an endeavour of personal significance, too.

“I’ve been struggling with it all through my life,” says Olubanjo, who grew up in Ibadan, Nigeria. “There was no stable electricity for the first 24 years of my life. There was a period of time in my household where there was no electricity for two years. It made reading and learning very tough.”

Olubanjo graduated from the University of Toronto’s faculty of Applied Science and Engineering with a master’s degree in civil engineering in 2019. From there he has gone on to develop a gamechanging approach to this issue, founding Reeddi – a green tech organisation that seeks to “bridge the accessibility gap” by delivering sustainable and affordable electricity to people who need it.

Olubanjo and his team have achieved this through a simple but ingenious distribution model: customers rent a Reeddi capsule, a watertight and lightweight solar-powered battery about the size of a portable speaker. Each solar-powered capsule is equipped with external USB and AC plugs and, at full capacity, can provide 200 watt-hours (Wh) of energy, which is sufficient to power a laptop for four hours, fully charge three mobile phones and run household lights for several hours, all at once. Multiple capsules can be connected, generating a larger power output for more demanding energy needs. The ambition is for this “modularity” feature to enable capsules to provide up to 2000Wh capacity while working in tandem.

It is easy to understand why Reeddi would be so appealing. In a place where people often live with less than four hours of electricity a day, customers can now simply rent a capsule from a nearby Reeddi energy station or participating local store for about 50c (USD) a day. Once the capsule is used, customers can return the spent battery to the store, where it can be exchanged for a new one and left to be recharged by the sun’s rays. It is easy, cheap, and clean.

“If it wasn’t for the University of Toronto, there would be no Reeddi,” says Olubanjo. The original plan was to create a kind of solar-powered “umbrella” that could charge mobile phones, but after discussing the idea with academics and friends at the institution, he envisioned something far more ambitious.

“The University of Toronto provided a space to incubate and grow my ideas,” he says, highlighting the centrality of the university’s Entrepreneurship Hatchery and the University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology programme (UTEST), both of which supported Reeddi’s development by helping Olubanjo discuss and define his aims with expert advisers. The Hatchery also provided him access to resources such as 3D printers, which he used to create the first Reeddi Capsule prototypes, and offered opportunities to collaborate with other students.

“UTEST and The Hatchery are part of U of T’s entrepreneurship network, which provides a range of support programmes to our entrepreneurs and startups,” says Derek Newton, assistant vice president, innovation, partnerships and entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto. “We want to ensure that founders like Olugbenga and companies like Reeddi have the very best chance of creating social impact.”

Reeddi is enjoying a wave of success. In 2019, it won awards at the Cisco Global Problem Challenge and the MIT Clean Energy Prize competition. Further recognition followed when, in December 2021, the company was placed on Time’s best inventions of 2021 list. “God was so good to make me walk through life with so many people who helped shape these ideas,” says Olubanjo

Success has not diluted his core aim: to provide reliable and affordable clean energy to people who have never had it. Next, he hopes to scale up operations in neighbouring African nations as well as countries in south-east Asia.

“Any community that does not have access to electricity is going to be significantly set back when compared to wealthier ones,” he says. “So, I felt I had to jump in and try to solve it in my own unique way because I know the problem; I have lived this pain.”

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