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Why Asoba?
Our Vision
Building the foundation of Africa’s industrial revolution with reliable clean energy
We are creating Africa’s premier, trans-national clean energy network with a goal of supporting 99.999% electricity reliability for our offtakers by 2030.
Our Mission Powering Africa’s key commercial and industrial sectors with automated, clean energy-based virtual power plants.
Asoba is a virtual power plant and energy management company. Based in both San Rafael, California and Cape Town, South Africa, we have a vision of creating Africa’s premier clean energy network and an aim of achieving 99.999% grid reliability. The heart of our thesis is that even though there is a 120GW capacity opportunity for solar across Africa, the poor transmission infrastructure and system mismanagement by state utility companies necessitates the use of AI to ensure that commercial and industrial offtakers in particular have the electricity access they need to support economic development driven by clean energy.
Our thesis is based on the two core problems faced by governments across the continent:
- 1.Business-as-usual is outright failure of national grids to ensure reliable power or to make electricity a ubiquitous resource. As a result, nearly 80% of businesses across the continent experience significant power reliability issues, with just over 50% investing in onsite diesel generators as backup.
- 2.Failures by national grid operators and volatile fiscal/monetary policy from governments have discouraged traditional finance from investing in African infrastructure projects. Governments are unable to raise adequate financing on their own and generally rely on project sponsors to raise 100% of project capital. As a result, 90% of all proposed renewable energy projects fail to get built.
There is a clear linear relationship between GDP/capita and electricity consumption. ~70% of electricity consumption comes from industrial and commercial offtakers. For them, lack of electricity reliability means lack of economic output. For the local economy it means reduced formal employment opportunities and low ceilings on household income.
Our thesis is that the current crisis of financialization and the failure of zero-interest central banking across the West will drive major reallocation of liquidity towards real assets like renewable energy. And that this can have a transformational impact on the growth trajectory of developing world economies while simultaneously helping these areas address the impacts of climate change.
Further, AI presents us with an opportunity to gain greater control over limited electricity supply and ensure better alignment between demand and supply on an hour by hour basis. Even with intermittent sources like solar and wind. Batteries are the key element that will unlock this level of control.
Last modified 1mo ago