Meet Kyaw Kyaw Linn, a former candle merchant at a night market in Yangon, Myanmar. The market makes use of candles as a light source, and for Kyaw Kyaw they’re a source of business; but with frequent rain and wind at the market, he realized that there’s a limit to candles’ sustainability. Here, he devised a solution – one that brought light to the market and to the spirits of other merchants. Kyaw Kyaw proves how illuminating one idea can be.

Powering Change

Almost 60 percent of the population of Myanmar does not have access to a stable supply of power. Despite being within 10 kilometers of the national power grid, nine-tenths of these people are left to their own devices to create light, power, and heat. This is even true in areas of Yangon, the country’s largest city. Its communities constantly battle with instability in power provision, never knowing when an outage will occur.

The vendors at the night market had no choice but to continue working even when light was not available, making it even more challenging to sell their wares. Kyaw Kyaw, seeing that candles were not a dependable light source, set up fluorescent lights around the market and connected them via wire to a generator. The light this provides greatly improves conditions for the market’s vendors, and has all been accomplished by one modest young man who saw a need and created a solution. “I make the light, and the light makes people happy,” says Kyaw Kyaw.

Striking a Balance

Like Kyaw Kyaw, we at Mitsubishi Electric are driven by our desire to better people’s lives. We understand that while ensuring stable generation, transmission, and distribution of power is crucial—and something we can achieve with our Smart Grid solutions that provide device and system support—it is only half the battle.

Capitalizing on our expertise in energy platform technology, as well as in information and communication technology, we are conducting verification testing for our Smart Community solutions both in Japan and abroad in cooperation with a host of external organizations.

Our advanced energy management systems, which feature energy storage solutions, demand forecasting, and production of photovoltaic and other renewable power, make it possible to control the supply-demand balance by ensuring that energy use can be adjusted commensurate to supply conditions.

To realize a safe, secure, and comfortable sustainable society, it is vital that we achieve and maintain the optimum balance between energy supply and energy use.

Illuminating the Future

As evidence of our commitment to a sustainable society, we create high-performance equipment and state-of-the-art power systems that not only feature reduced environmental impact, but high resistance to damage from disasters and other events, and flexibility to deal with electricity market fluctuations. We are also at work developing power stabilizing equipment and systems that will be able to respond to the constant increase in energy demand.

In the same way Kyaw Kyaw brought light to his community’s night market in support of the daily lives of market participants, we will bring intelligent energy generation, transmission, distribution, storage, and use management methods that will contribute to enhanced safety, stability, and continuity in the lives of people everywhere.

The content is true and accurate as of the time of publication.Information related to products and services included in this article may differ by country or region.