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| sep 22, 2021 | I'm grateful for the rare opportunity to join my team for the install & launch of our Navajo Power Home pilot this past
weekend—still processing the experience, but this is a
short video I made of our first Navajo install.
This summer I worked primarily on two projects: Latin American expansion strategy as well as operations for our launch on the Navajo Nation.
For the second, iluméxico teamed up with a native-owned commercial solar provider called Navajo Power and together we launched a joint venture,
Navajo Power Home (can you tell we did the branding in-house) and hired a small team of Navajos to begin sourcing a customer pipeline. We launched our pilot
this month, and I joined the iluméxico team for our first launch and installation. I had been working on
multiple different parts of this small operation—investor pitch decks, marketing materials, hiring and onboarding, financial modeling,
product plan strategy—so I thought I had a rough picture of what to expect on the Nation...
The Navajo Nation is 27,000 square miles of independently governed Native American lands spanning the states of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. About 1/3 of homes, amounting to roughly 50,000 people, do not have quality electricity—they use a combination of battery-powered lights, expensive and inefficient diesel generators, and most don't have any form of central wiring (basic switches, outlets) or running water. Most families live in one-room hogans or Graceland cabins (mobile homes they buy off the shelf and finance for ~$500/mo, which includes predatory interest rates over 3-5 years). Many families live off unstable incomes from construction odd-jobs or disability/unemployment benefits; they drive into towns like Tuba City to buy groceries (mostly canned goods) every month or so, in the absence of any kind of fresh produce access (or ability to grow such in the desert); there are significant cultural problems with alcoholism, crime, as well as child and spouse abandonment; they have the lowest high school graduation rates across all U.S. schools. We spent several 18-hour days—beginning and ending with long, remote drives from our team's airbnb in Flagstaff, AZ into various towns in the Nation—and otherwise filled with drilling, wiring, hanging out with Navajo kids, and installing a fully off-grid, offline, self-sufficient solar service that would then power these families' lights, televisions, and refrigerators for a small monthly fee (between $60-160 per month depending on their electricity consumption, which pales in comparison to the $15k upfront that most residential solar installations require). Our surroundings were among the remotest and most striking I've seen in the United States—vast stretches of arid desert connected by dirt roads, surrounded by high plateaus and mesas of beautiful red and orange hues, dotted with small communities of a dozen or two extended families living in one area. Amid cycles of rain and dust storms (pro tip: these layer really well onto the skin—great for exfoliation), daytime desert heat followed by chilly nights with headlamps, fueled mostly by fast food, and with an eclectic group of Mexican strategists, Navajo families, local solar workers, various siblings and neighbors of the aforementioned, clueless grad students from Boston wielding power tools (just the one), we brought light and a tiny bit of stability to these families. |
| aug 14, 2021 | As I bid farewell to Mexico City and look ahead to some time in the Oaxacan mountains, I am thinking more about what I will take away from this chapter. Work aside, there's something beautiful about the way that Mexicans (and Latin Americans more broadly I feel, not to over-generalize) lead a more present and balanced life, putting coastal elite Americans to shame. It's the small things—sitting down for lunch or coffee as the default, instead of a Friday luxury, for instance—or the warm, familial nature of some daily interactions (street vendors, waiters, service staff) that others tend to make more impersonal and transactional—that serve as a welcome reminder of how we Americans often take ourselves a little too seriously. |
| july 27, 2021 | I want to take a quick step back and put iluméxico's work in the context of broader solar and the role of renewables in the urgent climate work we are
doing as a global society. Right now, there are three available modalities for solar electricity: independent/off-grid
(what iluméxico is doing in rural communities); connected/on-grid (powered by solar but feeding the grid directly); and hybrid (self-powered and stored, but connected and
selling to the grid). In short—and read this book
if you're interested in the complexity and chaos of our grid system—the grid was not built to deal with renewables like solar and wind, which are more variable
in supply (due to dependence on variables like the sun and wind) and are harder and more expensive to
store versus traditional stock resources that currently power most of the grid, like coal and natural gas.
The energy transition that you'll hear people speak of involves a massive shift away from fossil fuel-based systems of energy production and consumption (primarily oil, natural gas, and coal) and toward renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and powered by high-density rechargables like lithium-ion batteries. Counterintuitively, however, the more we invest in green energy, the more our grid becomes fragile and unreliable; we need long distance power lines, affordable and powerful batteries, and many other infrastructure upgrades in order to make renewable energy work with our current grid system, especially as supply and demand are becoming less centralized and less regular. One key missing link is investing in storage of renewables. There are lots of promising new technologies—everything from molten salt, thermal energy, pumped hydroelectric, compressed air, vanadium flow batteries—that, with time and strategic investment, will hopefully make storage cheaper and more reliable. With that, the future of solar starts to become really exciting and tangible: we can build microgrids in cities where people can trade energy; we can grow and scale independent solar systems without having to rely on the grid; we can also more reliably use renewable sources to power the grid itself. The kind of work that iluméxico and Navajo Power Home are doing is dual-purpose: it's serving and electrifying the remotest, most rural and bottom-of-pyramid communities that have hopeless decades to wait for utilities to connect them to the grid, while investing in an off-grid, renewable-powered future that is closer than we think once we have affordable, utility-scale storage to depend on. |
| july 11, 2021 | I learned this week that many of iluméxico's customers in sparse, rural northern states like Guerrero and Chihuahua are involved in drug cartels, and I've been sitting with some amount of inner discomfort that arises from this realization. iluméxico's mission is for all families to have power, and I'm lucky enough to have seen firsthand the life-changing effects of energy poverty alleviation, so at a high level it makes sense to improve as many lives as possible in this way. But I got to thinking on a more operational level about the choices made to get there—every dollar, minute, person we invest in bringing solar systems to these very last-mile communities is a resource unit taken away from a different community, and do we have a responsibility to choose these communities based on some other metrics? Knowing the population and vocational/economic composition of a set of geographies, is it natural and right to pick based on virtue as well as need? Is it our prerogative? Our responsibility, even? On the other hand, we are a social enterprise and not a non-profit—we serve customers who pay us a fixed monthly fee for ongoing full-service: installations, equipment, repairs, upgrades, support. If a customer in a geography we serve is willing and able to pay, do we have any business discriminating on the basis of some hard-to-measure, harder-to-justify metric? What about the case where a morally questionable customer, like a cartel hitman, is more willing or able to pay than his or her counterpart who makes a peaceful, honest, but perhaps unsalaried living in a different rural community? Now, with morally questionable cartel salaries funding our business bottom line, the mission of the company conflicts even more with our financial interests. If you are an actual human who is actually reading this (hi) and have an opinion, please reach out—I'd love to hear what you think. |
| july 4, 2021 | This summer, I'm working—through the July 4 holiday, I might add, which I had to remind myself is decidedly American—on Latin American expansion strategy (we already have a joint venture in Colombia, but are evaluating markets and potential pilot programs in Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Panama), launch operations for an exciting new joint venture on the Navajo Nation, investor diligence and strategy as we pitch our core and joint ventures to impact investors across the world, and some policy research for carbon credit solutions. I'm excited to put my business toolkit to use and learn a ton about the international development, policy, and operations angles to a lean but mighty startup like this one. iluméxico's main innovation is the combination of last-mile solar delivery (they reach extremely rural communities that no others do), flexible and offline payment plans (to accommodate those without income stability or reliable internet), and permanence (full electrical installations the user experience is similar to a standard electrical one—lights, switches, plugs for appliances—which dignifies energy access instead of creating an interim or bandaid solution). |
| june 21, 2021 | Bienvenidos a la ciudad de Mexico! What a lovely city—lush and green, full of friendly locals and a rich cultural history, amazing street
fare and high-end gastronomy, fancy coffeeshops and local chocolate on every corner, laid back Latin American vibes—basically my dream. I've got an
apartment in Roma Norte, a lovely 15-minute walking commute to our co-working space, a small team of both people and dogs to collaborate with in the
office every day, and a whole world of culture, history, and food to explore around me. We grab beers on Fridays with some of the other startups in
the building, and new co-workers is eager to teach me the local Mexican slang, take me to the best street tacos, and share in
local-turned-touristy-but-still-unique attractions like Lucha Libre and the Xochimilco canals.
Mexico City is close enough—by flight time and time zone—to both coasts of the US to make working remotely very feasible, so I am lucky enough to have visitors every other weekend and a mix of expats and coworkers to explore with on the weekdays. My Spanish is quickly improving with lots of organic conversations and regular classes—not to mention soothing yoga classes that dust off my third-grad-level anatomy vocabulary as well as energizing Barry's Bootcamp sessions where I sprint on a treadmill at Mexico City's balmy 7,000 ft altitude while an extremely attractive Mexican woman yells at me in Spanish, kicking both my body and my Spanish back into shape. |
| june 2, 2021 | iluméxico is a social enterprise founded and based in Mexico City with the mission of bringing full-service solar systems to homes and communities
without access to the grid. Most last-mile communities in rural Mexico are using candles, kerosene lamps, sometimes batteries for hand flashlights or
even car batteries setup as a DIY mini electrical system. Some larger households are lucky enough to use diesel generators, but these are financially and
environmentally costly. The startup has expanded to launch joint ventures in Colombia and now the Navajo Nation (which I'll be working on this summer) and
is continuing to grow with the goal of being the off-grid utility of the Americas.
I'm excited about iluméxico not only because the team is small, creative, and inspired, but because I've seen firsthand the way that energy changes lives. Worldwide, lack of electricity in rural areas is the single biggest impediment to economic growth and contributes to isolation for many communities. Last year I led a field project to rural Uganda where my team of MBAs worked with a non-profit that electrifies rural health clinics with off-grid solar systems. We built out a social ROI model, conducted dozens of field interviews to write change narratives, mapped out the effects of energy poverty alleviation in relation to UN SDGs, and met with local government officials to build out policy, stakeholder, and infrastructure plans. The first, second, and third-order effects of rural electrification are truly staggering: improved energy affordability and financial resilience (amortized cost of solar light is a fraction of kerosene, paraffin, or batteries; more time to work on side businesses opens up additional income streams), health and wellness (fewer burns and respiratory issues from kerosene; less malaria from better bednet adherence, which families were scared to use with kerosene in the house due to the nets being flammable; less financial stress from having to choose between spending a week's income on either food or kerosene), standards of living (simply having a light to walk to the outhouse at night and avoid snakes), education levels (more light at night means children have more time for schoolwork). Seeing this firsthand, meeting and interviewing new mothers and rural families whose lives were turned around by the addition of a single solar light into their homes, stuck with me far beyond our time in East Africa, and my journey to iluméxico was the result my me seeking out more rural off-grid solar work in a different corner of the world. |
| may 1, 2021 | I'm in Miami for my final hurrah of business school, enjoying the vibrant Latin influence and oppressive humidity of South Beach with a
zillion or two MBA classmates, when I receive an email from the Chief Innovation Officer of iluméxico, Morgan, who offers me a final round interview.
I am thrilled until I read further that the video interview is not only early the next morning, but also—I blinked a few times—in Spanish.
I had lived and worked abroad in the past—in Argentina where my rusty high school Spanish quickly adjusted to the harsh local accent and built up to something that could be confused with conversational fluency, and later in the Middle East, where it was all I could do to pick up a few words of Arabic, made tougher by the fact that locals often visually misplaced me as an Arab myself. But my Spanish needed more than a little dusting off after nearly six years of dormancy (I might note that my neuroplasticity is woefully declining as I age) so I jumped from the beach into an AC sanctuary, opened Evernote and Google Translate in a split screen, and began looking up, drafting out, and reciting aloud every possible sentence or expression I might need to say. Do they use o sea as a filler in Mexico the way they do in Spain? Does fuera de practica work to describe the rusty state of my Spanish, if the literal translation doesn't? What on earth are all the technical words for solar and climate change that they'll inevitably ask me about? Have Google Translate and Siri had a baby yet, to help me interpret the questions asked of me if spoken at the pace of a local? Let's just say that me getting the job the following morning is more a testament to Morgan's bilingual generosity than any actual skill on my part... stay tuned. |
