Speakers

Stewart has been involved in rural electrification since 1998, when he was the project manager for the construction of several microhydro minigrids in Nepal. This experience of seeing how engineering could improve living conditions for rural villagers developed into a desire to do more of the same, but at a bigger scale that would make more impact than the traditional aid, charity and volunteer driven models could achieve. During 2000-2004, he gained commercial project development experience building large wind farms in Australia with Hydro Tasmania and undertaken a range of renewable energy consulting jobs for internal and external clients, whilst also assisting Light Up the World Foundation to continue bringing solar-powered white LED lighting systems to villages. In 2005, he co-founded Barefoot Power as a commercial for-profit social enterprise to raise larger quantities of investment for villages, which became a recognized market leader in offgrid solar lighting, winning many awards and reaching its goal of providing 1 million people with basic access to energy by 2011. This included raising more than $10 million in debt, equity and grants from over 50 different angel and impact investors. To continue further innovation, he founded VIA in 2012 with two co-founders and some angel investors to move beyond the cash-sale model into 3-5 year leasing projects, and to develop a wider range of more powerful uses of solar, such as the concept of solar powered agro-processing mills to help farmers use daytime solar power for productive income-generating uses. Bringing as much joy as energizing villages is his wonderful family, who patiently tolerate these obsessions until they run their course. Stewart is the Managing Director of VIA.