Ben Jeffreys on Solving Clean Cooking for 4 Billion People, Carbon Credits, and Impact Flywheels | Evolve 079

Brandon Stover On Life

Ben Jeffreys is the CEO of ATEC International, which supports households across Asia & Africa to transition to modern, decarbonized cooking through its patented IoT stove products - delivering cost efficiency to households, data-validated carbon credits to net-zero partners and addressing the 4 billion people who lack access to clean, modern cooking. After moving his family to Cambodia in 2015 to commercialize ATEC’s biodigester prototype, the winning product of the Google Impact Challenge, into a social enterprise, he has helped ATEC become a global leader in clean cooking it's two flagship on-grid and off-grid products delivering data-driven scalable impact not only for cooking, but data validation of carbon reduction as well. ATEC is aiming to help 800 million households to offset more emissions than the global airline industry whilst saving the lives of millions of women each year who traditionally cook with wood.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE

• How clean cooking products increases life quality, health, and household incomes
• How ATEC is using data collection and technology to offset carbon emissions
• The economics of carbon credits and why they are attractive to companies
• How to choose a high impact problem you can have a significant role in solving
• How to develop an Impact Flywheel to scale a solution
• and much more...

Full show notes, transcripts, and resources can be found here: evolvethe.world/episodes/79

The Evolve podcast is produced by Plato University.

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:40) - How big is the clean cooking problem globally?

(02:46) - How to choose a high impact problem you can have a significant role in solving

(06:29) - What macro trends in energy made ATEC's solutions possible

(07:23) - ATEC's clean cooking biodigester and induction stove solutions

(11:41) - How to develop an Impact Flywheel to scale a solution

(16:50) - Why Ben moved his family to Cambodia

(21:04) - How ATEC gained early adopters with its PAYGO model

(23:01) - How ATEC developed it's prototypes

(27:01) - How clean cooking products increases life quality, health, and household incomes

(30:12) - Why ATEC decided to pivot to induction stoves

(33:04) - How ATEC is using data collection and technology to offset carbon emissions

(36:34) - The economics of carbon credits and why they are attractive to companies

(40:55) - How to face overwhelming problems

(42:37) - Why its important to choose purposeful work

(46:18) - How to identify a problem you are equipped to solve

(48:34) - What our energy solutions look like for the next decade

(53:17) - How we can push the world to Evolve