Programmes
How energy and water systems are built, paid for and relied on, where the network reaches and where it never did.
Energy and water are the two systems everything else in a transition rests on. They are also the two where the same research question keeps arriving in different clothes: how does a metered, paid-for service reach a household the network was not built for, and stay reliable enough that people plan around it.
Mini-grids and off-grid supply is the research area closest to the Lab's earliest energy fieldwork. A pay-as-you-go connection is a mini-utility with a repayment schedule, and its success depends on affordability at a household's real income, reliability that people plan against, and after-sales that outlives the founder. The Lab looks at what actually keeps a household paying, and who sits at the very end of the access curve when everybody else has moved on.
Renewables, storage and grid integration is where the same programme meets the grid that already exists. Curtailment, storage siting, coincident peak, and the anchor-tenant contracts that decide who firms the system: none of these are engineering questions in the strict sense. Each is a decision about who bears the cost of a shared piece of infrastructure, and the Lab reads them through the utility, the developer, the industrial buyer, and the residential customer at once.
Water delivery, vendors and payment is the other half of the same argument, at a different tap. Kiosks, meters, vending points and household connections are all payment interfaces layered over a delivery system that has to be trusted before it is used. The Lab studies transboundary and drought-stressed catchments alongside the peri-urban vendor markets where the affordability question is at its sharpest.
Water is where the Lab's roots run deepest: based in Delft, a global centre of water research, we pair genuine technical understanding of water systems with the field methods to study how they actually serve people.
Energy access.
Water and sanitation.
Energy. The technology is largely settled. Whether a household connects, keeps paying, and benefits depends on affordability, reliability, and whether the system was designed around how people actually use power.
The Lab documents that. We are the party asking whether locally-owned developers can scale, whether access converts into the productive uses that make it self-sustaining, and who sits at the very end of the access curve, the finding that decides if a transition is fair. Our Pyropower case study shows waste-to-energy at the smallholder scale.
Water. The technical solutions mostly exist. Success depends on whether infrastructure is sustained, trusted, and maintained, and whether it reaches the rural and marginalised.
The Lab documents why a hand pump is maintained in one village and abandoned in the next, what builds or erodes trust in a source, and whether sanitation behaviour actually changes beyond the counting of latrines. That is the socio-technical layer an engineering audit never reaches, and the one that decides whether investment lasts.
How households actually build up an energy portfolio, one fuel at a time.
Read →The counterfactual at the centre of efficiency-as-a-service.
Read →The hyperscaler class now setting the direction of firm clean generation.
Read →Why clean generation and cheap electricity are not the same thing.
Read →The defection dynamic in shared infrastructure, and who is left carrying the fixed cost.
Read →Cooling-driven data centre demand is not baseload, and grid planning treats it as if it were.
Read →For the full series across the transitions we study, see Articles.
If you are building, financing or regulating a network reaching households the grid was not built for, tell us the decision you are facing.
