Empower a Billion Lives Competition - Accelerating Scale in Energy Access

Three billion people around the world live in energy poverty, including 1.1 billion people with absolutely no access to electricity. Such a lack of energy access severely impacts their living standard, health, productivity, education, and prevents digital and financial inclusion.  IEEE Empower a Billion Lives is a recurring global competition to crowdsource innovation to develop viable solutions to energy access that also have radical scaling potential. A proposed solution should address the entire power generation, delivery and management system, including the physical, technical, social and business elements needed to operate the system sustainably. The competition consists of three rounds; an online round running until August 2018, five regional rounds in five continents from Nov 2018 – Jan 2019, and a global final in September 2019, with total prizes and awards estimated at $1 Million.