Brazil’s Amazon teems with plant and animal life and is critical to the health of the planet as a storehouse of carbon dioxide. The nation also has the cleanest national grid among G20 countries, thanks to abundant hydropower, much of it originating in the Amazon.

But many Amazonian communities aren’t connected to the grid. In remote areas with no roads, transmission lines are difficult to build and maintain. Instead, they depend on polluting diesel fuel for electricity.