As of January 2025, some 600 million people on the African continent were without reliable access to electricity–that’s more than 80% of all the people on Earth whose days largely end at dusk. It’s a stark statistic, particularly set against the fact that Africa has more than enough natural resources–hydro, solar, geothermal, wind–to be a place of clean energy abundance.

At the time, the government of Kenya had partnered with some European governments to build a 300+ megawatt wind farm on the shores of Lake Turkana. But they hadn't built the transmission lines–a separate project that itself would take another four years to complete. With turbines up but no lines to move the power, 300+ megawatts (enough to power as many as a million homes in Kenya) was literally stranded, effectively useless.

And that worked–and continues to work–very well. Just this year, Gridless made a deal with a hydropower company in Northwestern Zambia–a site that was built 15 years ago, but had never managed to sell more than 30% of their energy to their local community: they’d act as buyer of last resort, meaning they’d buy every kilowatt hour produced that the local community (the buyers of first resort) wouldn’t.