Elena van Hove was a Fellow within the C-BEAR+ Program at RLI from July 2020 until July 2021. She was enrolled in the master’s degree program at Arizona State University at the School of Sustainability and also the head of the Off-Grid cohort at the Laboratory for Energy and Power Solutions (LEAPS). Elena received her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at Purdue University.

In the context of the C-BEAR+ fellowship program, Elena was working on how productive loads contribute to the sustainability of off-grid mini-grid projects specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa. She analyzed how productive energy usage affects the financial viability of projects for mini-grid developers while still providing socio-economic benefits to communities.

Elena is currently the Director of Global Energy Access at LEAPS where she manages a variety of off-grid and on-grid energy access projects. She also jointly supervises an RLI-LEAPS collaborative paper on assessing healthcare electrification planning through the case study of Ghana.