Life Without Energy

Client

  • SPACE10

Sector

  • Energy

Service

  • Service Innovation

Electricity is often invisible until it’s gone. While it is fundamental to everything from economic productivity to health and safety, over two billion people around the world continue to live with limited or no access to reliable power. This project, commissioned by SPACE10 and led in the field by Quicksand, set out to better understand how energy poverty shapes everyday life—and how clean, off-grid solutions might transform it.

We visited 40 households across four countries (India, Kenya, Peru, and Indonesia) gathering first-hand insights on what life without energy really looks like. The research focused on lived experiences in the home, the role of energy in aspirations and wellbeing, and how universal energy access could unlock human potential. The resulting report blends ethnographic research with strategic foresight to guide future product and service innovation in clean energy.

Understanding the Challenge

In high-income contexts, energy is ambient and assumed. But in large parts of the world, families must make daily trade-offs between basic needs—cooking, lighting, communication—due to the absence of a stable electricity supply. For many, this results in reduced opportunities for learning, work, and health, and in increased exposure to indoor air pollution from kerosene or biomass-based cooking.

Collaborating with local experts, we conducted research in four geographies that represent regional diversity in both culture and infrastructural access: Sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya), South America (Peru), South Asia (India), and Southeast Asia (Indonesia). Each country provided unique insights into how life at home unfolds in the absence—and presence—of energy.

The study was built around two key frames: Life at Home and Life with Energy. The former explored how families maintain their routines, manage responsibilities, and preserve dignity in low-energy environments. The latter investigated how even limited access to clean energy—such as a solar lantern or small home system—can rewire a household’s priorities, productivity, and aspirations.

Energy and Its Intersections

Energy access is more than just power—it is possibility. The research confirmed strong links between electrification and improvements in health, income, education, and gender equality. Lighting extends productive hours in the day. Connectivity enables learning and communication. Women with energy access earn significantly more than those without it. The research surfaced how, across cultures, households consistently prioritised safe shelter, income stability, care for vulnerable members, and community connectivity—needs that clean energy directly supports.

A particularly striking insight was how families saw energy not only as a functional utility but as a tool for dignity and ambition. In Peru, access to light enabled after-hours stitching work that doubled household income. In Kenya, solar systems reduced time spent collecting firewood, freeing up hours for caregiving and rest. In India, even small home systems enabled children to study longer and perform better at school.

From Insight to Innovation

This research laid the foundation for mapping new avenues for product and service development in the clean energy space. The report identified the transformative potential of decentralised energy technologies such as solar home systems, mini-grids, and small portable kits, in connecting underserved communities. In regions where extending the grid is unfeasible, these off-grid alternatives offer scalable, sustainable solutions.

Quicksand and SPACE10 distilled key design principles around two primary opportunity areas. First, last-mile provision: how might clean energy solutions be adapted to the infrastructural, cultural, and economic realities of remote and underserved populations? Second, off-grid solar innovation: how can solar products not just deliver power, but enhance the overall quality of life, catalysing education, livelihoods, and wellbeing?

By combining deep ethnographic research with systems thinking, the project offered a compelling roadmap for inclusive energy innovation—one rooted in the voices and visions of the very people it seeks to serve.

The Life Without Energy report serves both as a research compendium and as a directional tool for designing energy solutions that are socially embedded, environmentally sustainable, and economically viable. Beyond documenting stories of resilience, it shifts the conversation from energy as infrastructure to energy as empowerment. It demonstrated how listening carefully—to rituals, dreams, and daily struggles—can inspire product strategies that are truly aligned with user realities. SPACE10 has since used the findings to inform its broader work around future living and planetary health.

Resources