by Ali Husain EBL II Global Finals O n Tuesday, 21 March 2023, the winners of the second Empower A Billion Lives (EBL II) competition were awarded a total of US$475,000 in cash prizes to help them scale up their novel Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPEL.2023.3273891 Date of publication: 27 June 2023 business models and cutting-edge, high-impact solutions to extreme poverty and lack of access to energy in the developing world. EBL is an IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) sponsored program with the mission to bring the benefits of electric power to the nearly 800 million people without energy access and the 3 billion who do not have a reliable grid connection. EBL has just completed its second competition where companies, NGOs, and student teams submit, refine, field test, and share their energy access solutions to provide economically viable and scalable solutions for communities with average incomes of lower than US$2 per day. June 2023 z IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE 97http://americas.fujielectric.com/ieee-power