Empower a Billion Lives Grant

Empower a Billion Lives Grant

Status: ACTIVE
Funder: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Amount: Up to US $1,000,000
Last Updated: October 09, 2025

Summary

The Empower a Billion Lives Grant, organized by the IEEE, seeks innovative solutions to address energy poverty affecting 3 billion people globally. The competition emphasizes technology, social impact, and business models, encouraging holistic approaches for scalable energy access. It invites teams to develop economically viable solutions that can transform lives while reducing environmental risks. Participants can compete in various tracks, aiming for impactful outcomes in health, education, and sustainability, with a total prize purse of $1 million.

Overview

The Challenge: To Accelerate Scale in Energy Access IEEE Empower a Billion Lives (EBL) is expected to be a biennial global competition, which challenges teams from around the world to develop innovative solutions that can bring cost-effective energy, and its life transforming impact, to billions of unserved and underserved people. The competition encourages a holistic approach by evaluating technology, social impact, and business models of competing solutions. Winning teams will demonstrate success through field-testing and a path to rapid scaling of their solutions. Need for the Competition Grand Challenge: Three billion people around the world live in severe energy poverty, including 1.1 billion who live completely off-grid. Providing affordable energy access to them can dramatically impact their living standard, health, education, productivity and ability to be a part of modern society. Many programs and initiatives have been doing stellar work in tackling energy poverty, but much remains to be done. Solving energy poverty using mature and proven 20th century solutions, an obvious path forward, could result in an additional 3.8 gigatons per year of carbon emissions - an environmental catastrophe! New solutions that can scale are clearly needed! Our Approach: IEEE Empower a Billion Lives (EBL) is a recurring global competition organized by the IEEE Power Electronics Society, to crowdsource regionally relevant innovation to accelerate deployment of energy access solutions in the affected areas. It is anticipated that fast moving 21st century technologies with rapidly declining prices2 can allow a holistic approach to the design of energy solutions to address the needs of families and communities living completely off-grid or suffering from a severe lack of energy access. Effective solutions should be economically viable today, and should be able to provide continuing value to the families and communities as they improve their lives. A primary focus for EBL is to help develop new energy access solutions with reduced technology and market risk. Another is to prove out new business models that show impact and scale can be achieved with solutions that are economically viable and environmentally sustainable. The EBL Competition: Competing teams will develop and demonstrate in target communities, technically innovative solutions to address the needs of the rapidly growing global energy access market of 3 billion people. These solutions also have to show business viability and the potential for rapid scaling. Online Round: Teams will submit proposals online. Teams meeting the requirements as noted by judges will be able to compete in one of five Regional Rounds.Regional Round: Each Regional Round will have winners in each track. There will be additional special prizes, including prizes for student teams. Winning teams will have to participate in a field evaluation to be eligible to participate in the Global Final.Global Final: All succeeding teams will compete in the Global Final. The total anticipated prize purse is $1 Million. Impact: Ongoing competition cycles will drive a continuous learning process leveraging past learnings and rapid technology advances to deliver tremendously impactful solutions. EBL believes that rapidly changing technologies offer a unique opportunity to crowdsource innovation globally with cross-disciplinary teams, to spark creativity that can generate unexpected outcomes – the heart of the competition is this WOW factor. Teams offering affordable and innovative solutions to energy access can win recognition on a global stage and also see financial success. The impact of affordable energy access on families and communities can be profound, providing positive outcomes in areas of health, food security, education, increased productivity, digital and financial inclusion, and livelihood and lifestyle changes Common Requirements The Empower a Billion Lives competition invites teams to submit proposals addressing key challenges in the scaling of energy access solutions. 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 does not cover design of new generation sources or appliances, although those can be a part of an overall system design. A key EBL objective for energy impoverished families and communities is to facilitate their digital and financial inclusion in society and to stimulate productive uses of energy to support assimilation into the global economy. From a technical viewpoint, proposed solutions are likely to address key issues such as real-time control and operation of the system, load management and system optimization, and should meet both current and future customer needs. However, EBL is really seeking innovative (WOW!) ideas that fulfill the basic energy access needs of the families and communities, but maybe in a completely different manner – such as using a services model. Solutions do however need to address business issues such as capital and operating costs, and show a business model that is economically viable. Solutions should provide the equivalent of ESMAP Tier 2 access in terms of functionality enabled, which is a minimum of 50 watts (for 30 minutes), or more than 200 watt-hours per day. Competition Tracks EBL specifically targets two groups as consumers of energy access solutions – the single family and the community. The typical family earns less than $1500 per year and lives in a low population density rural community, which has 20-1000 homes. Successful EBL solutions will solve energy access problems for both groups – some in a decentralized bottom-up manner, and some in a centralized top-down manner. The traditional approach has been through electricity generation and delivery, but there may be other solutions that take a completely different approach, and still achieve the desired objectives. EBL would like to encourage teams to focus on the broad goals, and to offer solutions that solve the technology and business issues, and are able to demonstrate impact. The two categories for competitors are: Decentralized Model: The proposed solution will serve single homes at the Tier 2 or equivalent level without creating an entire distribution infrastructure in advance of when it is needed. A distribution network may be built and expanded whenever needed by interconnecting smaller systems on an ad-hoc basis to share resources, improve reliability, provide community level services and to realize operational and cost efficiencies. A successful solution will show technical viability and the business model needed to reach scale. Centralized Utility Model: The proposed solution is a centrally planned and implemented power generation and distribution model offering the core service at the community level. Individual families are served as customers from the centralized service. Operations and billing follow traditional utility models, and may include some level of customer-owned generation and storage. The proposed solutions will address physical and transactive elements needed for sustainable operation and economic viability, and will show the solution’s potential for scaling. In each track, there will be two sub-tracks – for established companies offering commercial products in the market, and for new technologies and solutions that are not currently commercially available. The overall competition categories are: Track 1: Decentralized Model (Tr1)Track 1 a): Commercially available solution (Tr1A)Track 1 b): Emerging solution (Tr1B)Track 2: Centralized Utility Model (Tr2)Track 2 a): Commercially available solution (Tr2A)Track 2 b): Emerging solution (Tr2B) The expectation is that solutions will target different levels of energy access with different levels of technical and business sophistication. Best performers will provide the highest level of performance and functionality at the lowest cost with a viable business model and the ability to rapidly scale in this market segment. The same metrics will apply throughout the competition, but with increasing rigor through the field evaluation and the global final. A team may state their participation category, however, the category decision of the EBL Rules and Judging Committee will be final. Judging for teams in both tracks depends on the ability to provide value, both at a single-family level and at the community level. Decentralized Track 1 solutions have traditionally served a single family’s needs with higher capital efficiency, but cost-effectively expanding system capacity and service levels to serve community needs has been challenging. Centralized Track 2 solutions are traditionally better able to provide community level services, but with much higher capital and operating costs, normally requiring oversized infrastructure. Achieving economic viability for smaller communities, or for communities where the needs grow rapidly, has also been challenging. Winning solutions are likely to use technology and new business models to offer the best features of both – low capital cost, good asset utilization, flexibility, economic viability and system expansion ability as needed. Assessing Success Existing solutions and strategies may not be enough, and that new thinking is required. The judges will be actively looking for the WOW factor in each topic area that shows novel cross-disciplinary thinking, which may provide new strategies for solving the scaling problem. These approaches include, but are not limited to, frugal engineering (ultra-low-cost but fully featured solutions), use of technologies such as PV solar, batteries, power electronics, decentralized control, cybersecurity, communications, IoT, cloud, machine learning, edge-computing, block-chain, pay-go, mobile wallets, data analytics, etc., andnew business models.

Eligibility

You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website. Contest is open to residents of the United States of America and other countries, where permitted by local law, who are the age of eighteen (18) and older. EBL teams can include individuals from academic institutions, start-ups, research labs, NGOs, large corporations or interested individuals. Appendix I provides details on how to participate in EBL.EBL invites companies that commercially offer products meeting the competition criteria to participate. The simplified process for such companies is to provide product details and specifications, evidence of operation and impact in the field, financial data as appropriate, and a review of the scaling potential.The Judging Rubric in Appendix II provides further details.EBL specifically invites people who are currently involved with energy-access efforts in the target communities (see Appendix I and II) to become involved, and to bring their first-hand knowledge of the needs and aspirations of people in these communities to EBL teams. EBL also invites student teams from across the globe to participate. There will be special prizes for teams that consist only of students.Faculty support in an advisory role is permitted but must be declared and should not trigger conflict of  interest or intellectual property (IP) ownership issues as defined in the Official Contest Rules. EBL is also interested in fostering the development of ‘open platforms’ and ‘open-source’ software to enhance collaboration and promote creativity.Solving complex problems can appear challenging for small teams with limited access to resources or newer technologies. EBL is establishing collaboration mechanisms so individuals and organizations seeking to partner can connect and collaborate.

Ineligibility

People not allowed to participate in or to contribute directly to the solutions proposed or implemented by an EBL team include IEEE employees, members of the EBL Rules and Judging Committee, and individuals who have a direct role in enforcing the metrics and rules for the competition. Individuals who cannot participate in EBL may provide financial support for a team. The team must declare this support and it must be approved, in writing, by the EBL Rules and Judging Committee. Review of submitted proposals will follow IEEE guidelines, typically used for review of technical papers, for conflict of interest management. In case there are questions regarding eligibility of an individual to be a part of an EBL team, the decision of the EBL Rules and Judging Committee will be fin.