The Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy (ISEP) and the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) have teamed up with the MacArthur Foundation to undertake an innovative, data-driven approach to improve access to sustainable energy in rural India.

This 2-year study will generate high-resolution data on energy use, pilot innovative approaches to monitoring energy access in rural India, and offer a new approach to promote sustainable energy access in diverse rural communities. Besides using traditional household surveys, this study will leverage the penetration of devices connected to the internet and energy monitors to improve the quality and speed of data collection, on energy consumption in rural India.

The project will produce an assessment of the state of energy access in the country. This will involve a traditional in-person survey of households, as well as the piloting of several newer methods for collecting this data (such as using mobile devices). In addition to collecting critical information on energy access, the surveys will also allow us to compare methods for information collection and make future efforts more efficient. Our surveys will cover a range of issues dealing with energy access, the role of gender in energy concerns and preferences, and the utilization of clean cooking technologies. The second part of this project will focus on gathering data using more non-traditional sources, such as low-cost sensors, mobile device data, and scraping government websites, to determine if such approaches can augment surveys and enable low-cost data gathering on a consistent basis.

ISEP and CEEW are excited to announce this new partnership with the MacArthur Foundation that will have a large impact on how both energy research and policy in India.