In global development, as in business, delivery can determine failure or success. The windswept steppes of Mongolia, among the world’s harshest environments, have become a testing ground for how best to deliver something increasingly important to Earth’s entire population: electricity.
The conditions in rural Mongolia are forbidding. Winter temperatures on the steppes regularly drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit). Over a barren landscape three times the size of France, there are no paved roads. About a quarter of the country’s 2.8 million people herd goats and yaks. They shelter in traditional felt tents known as gers, as they have for thousands of years.
