About Powering Agriculture
Powering Agriculture: An Energy Grand Challenge for Development supports the development and deployment of clean energy innovations that increase agriculture productivity and stimulate low carbon economic growth in the agriculture sector of developing countries to help end extreme poverty and extreme hunger.
Globally, more than 800 million farmers manually lift and haul water to irrigate their farmland. iDE’s Clean Irrigation Solution can run on a variety of power sources—solar steam power, photovoltaic power, and grid-connected AC where available, to access groundwater from deeper depths than conventional pumps, and maintains a slow, steady discharge rate.
iDE has, in recent weeks, installed the first round of pumps in Nepal for field trials. The field-testing is important because it gives farmers a chance to see the technology, understand how it works and provide their feedback.
iDE uses a market-based approach to make technologies for better agriculture more readily available to farmers in developing countries. A great example is Powering Agriculture Innovator Futurepump, a business that iDE helped create. Their Sunflower Pump is successful in several developing markets.
Powering Agriculture Innovators iDE and Futurepump are both examples of impact investing, which Iain Hunter, CEO of iDE, says can be a game changer in the renewables sector and in environmental projects. He suggests that businesses can "future-proof" themselves by investing in renewables.
Over April 13–26, PAEGC visited 11 of iDE’s SunFlower solar pumps installed in five plain regions of Nepal. PAEGC interviewed farmers using the SunFlower pumps for irrigation, as well as various stakeholders in the pump supply chain, including an agricultural cooperative and a future pump retailer.
