TED Talks Daily
700 million people still live without electricity. Here’s how to fix that | Jacqueline Novogratz
22 Jul 2025
Impact investor and Acumen CEO Jacqueline Novogratz unveils a bold vision to bring off-grid solar electricity to 700 million people still living in darkness, transforming lives while slashing emissions. She asks a thought-provoking question: What if this generation could be remembered for finally bringing electricity — and dignity — to everyone on the planet?For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. In 100 years, what will future generations say about us and what we did or didn't do for them and this planet?
It's a powerful question that impact investor Jacqueline Novogratz asks in her talk, where she lays out a plan to bring electricity to everyone on the planet, fixing, as she calls it, one of the biggest planetary market failures of our lifetime. For Jacqueline, it is in darkness that instability, forced migration, and inequality rise.
Sharing examples of success stories her firm has invested in, she lays out how this dream is possible and asks us to consider what is the risk of not daring to be better and not daring to bring light sustainably to all.
I want to share with you a plan to fix one of the biggest planetary market failures of our lifetime. It's been nearly 150 years since Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb, ushering in the age of electricity. So how can it be that 700 million people on this planet still lack access to electricity? When the sun goes down, they depend on dirty,
expensive, sometimes dangerous fuels for light. And these are some of the most overlooked and underestimated people on the planet. But we can solve this problem if we have the moral imagination to do two things. First, we have to rethink how we approach risk. And second,
we have to address the false binary between mitigation, or reducing emissions, and adaptation, or adjusting to the climate crisis. Before we talk about that, though, let's look at what's at stake. We know that the most vulnerable are disproportionately impacted by climate events. Electricity is resilience. It's agency. It's light and irrigation and communications, and it's cooling.
It's also basic empowerment. We live in an age where tech entrepreneurs are promising that every child on the planet will have their own AI tutor, unless you're a child without access to electricity. The good news is that, as we've discussed, solar energy has been one of the great success stories of the 21st century.
When my organization, Acumen, started investing in off-grid electricity in 2007, 1.5 billion people on the planet had no access to electricity. Today, that number's been cut in half. And while off-grid can't claim full credit, it's been an important part of the story.
And I've had the privilege of investing in and witnessing the evolution of this extraordinary off-grid sector that started off with lights, and then we saw home systems with radios and cell phone chargers, and then emerged the adjacent possible.
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