Mopo: Meet the Sheffield battery firm aiming to rethink how we imagine future power grids
A Yorkshire-based firm which supplies rechargeable batteries to communities in Africa has said its tech could lead to a reshaping of how energy grids across the globe are imagined.
Based in Sheffield, Mopo supplies batteries to communities in Sub-Saharan Africa which have little to no electricity infrastructure.
In April, The company announced that it had reached the milestone of renting out one million batteries per month. Mopo CEO, Chris Longbottom, however, believes this could be just the start of the firm’s journey.
Speaking to The Yorkshire Post, Mr Longbottom said: “We think there is an opportunity to reimagine how grids are fundamentally developed.
“You probably read a lot about the intermittency of renewable energy, and questions around how good wind farms can really be when it isn't windy half the time.
“But if you're starting from a position where there is no grid at all, and starting from a position where customers align their spending patterns to their own income and the price of goods and services, there's actually an opportunity to build a grid that has this intermittent renewable energy at its core.”
Designed to replace environmentally-damaging fossil fuel generators, the firm’s batteries are charged through solar energy at local hubs, which are run by members of the community.
Community members are able to rent out Mopo’s batteries as and when they need them in order to power household goods including lighting, cooking appliances and sewing machines, as well as mobile phones and other smaller devices.
Longbottom believes the lessons learned from creating this model could also be used to rethink how electricity grids work in the Western world.
“We’re building some technology out for this story, and we think customers will respond very well to it,” he said, “and I think, eventually, that will come back to Western grids.”
“What will happen is that some of the tech we develop which comes to fruition in Africa will probably have significant relevance to how we build the grid in the West, where we’re increasingly feeding renewables in and thinking about where to put storage.
“Our vision is that you can start with very small, very cheap individual units of energy storage, and the next generation of that will be entirely modular.
“The way it will work is instead of paying an electrician to plumb in a super expensive system and have it all wired up, this will be self installable by the customer. You will be able to start with super small units, in a position of control of saying how much backend you will need, and you will be able to increase and expand that in a modular fashion.”
Mr Longbottom’s comments come after Mopo recently announced that it had secured £1m in funding via Innovate UK, on behalf of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. The firm said it would use the funding to expand its pay-per-use battery rental business in Nigeria.
This funding boost also followed Mopo’s announcement in June that it had been backed by Octopus Energy Group
Launched in 2017, Mopo has delivered over 26 million battery rentals across Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Speaking on why the firm had chosen Africa to launch its service, Longbottom said: “If you want to develop this as a concept where renewables are at the core, and intermittency is at that core, there's no better place to do it than in Africa.
“The mobile phone revolution has already swept Africa, so you still have this thing where mobile phones are everywhere – even smartphones by this point. But if you're very poor, and you live in the middle of nowhere in Africa, you’re walking somewhere to get your phone charged.
“Our concept was always that there's got to be a better way to distribute power in these places where there's no grid.
“We realised very quickly realised, batteries are emerging as a key industry, surely we can use batteries to distribute energy to people based on what they can actually afford to pay today, without any kind of financialisation or debt.
“For a lot of these customers, we are probably the first international company that many of them are ever interacting with, save for examples like cola and washing powder. We’ve gone from doing a small number of rentals to now doing 26 million battery rentals, and we do a rate of over a million rentals every month.”