Afrigather Solar King helps poor households throughout Asia and Africa entry dependable, clear energy and more healthy methods of cooking.
Accessing clear sources of power has all the time been a problem for low-income communities worldwide, given the excessive up-front prices. Not less than a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of individuals around the globe have unreliable or no entry to the electrical energy grid, forcing lots of them to spend as a lot as 10% of their incomes on soiled fuels—like kerosene and diesel—that hurt each their well being and the setting.
One work-around for this problem is to permit households to pay for clear power in small, reasonably priced quantities as they use it.
That is what Solar King has been capable of ship. By offering photo voltaic panels, handheld solar-powered lamps, batteries, and residential programs that energy lights and gadgets to communities in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, it says, it gives dependable renewable electrical energy to some 40 million folks. Its pay-as-you-go enterprise mannequin permits households to spend as little as $0.15 per day.
Now, having acquired PayGo Power in 2023, Solar King is increasing its product portfolio into clear cooking.
PayGo’s stoves run on liquefied petroleum fuel, which produces much less of the health-damaging and climate-warming air pollution generated by charcoal, biomass, and related fuels used to warmth primary stoves in lots of properties. The family prices for the stoves and gasoline are backed by carbon credit that the corporate earns for decreasing greenhouse-gas emissions, by a voluntary carbon offsets program.
Crucially, PayGo has earned excessive marks from tutorial specialists for growing family cookstoves that reliably scale back indoor air air pollution and local weather emissions. Solar King says it’s additionally growing different cooking home equipment, like strain cookers, that might run on the renewable electrical energy it supplies.
Key indicators
- Business: Renewable power
- Based: 2008
- Headquarters: Nairobi, Kenya
- Notable reality: Solar King provides photo voltaic merchandise to greater than 40 million folks in 10 African and two Asian nations.
Potential for influence
Solar King’s entire vary of product strains helps lower the emissions driving local weather change.
As an example, it has already offered 23 million photo voltaic merchandise to earlier customers of kerosene lamps, every of which may pump out round a ton of carbon dioxide a decade.
And by decreasing the necessity to acquire biomass to provide family gentle, warmth, or gasoline for cooking, the corporate may also help scale back deforestation in addition to the emissions that happen from burning plant matter.
Cooking with wooden and charcoal is a significant contributor to world warming, answerable for roughly 2% of worldwide carbon emissions. The particulate air pollution it releases additionally kills hundreds of thousands of individuals yearly.
Voluntary carbon markets for clear cookstoves will solely work if the applications are performed in a clear and credible method; such applications have come beneath extreme criticism for inflating the local weather advantages of the home equipment, partially by overestimating how a lot they’re really used. However PayGo was amongst a number of cookstove initiatives that researchers on the College of California, Berkeley, discovered did meet stringent high quality standards, partially by “metering” precise utilization of cleaner substitute stoves. The stoves additionally use a gasoline that meets World Well being Group well being requirements for indoor air air pollution.
By working in additional rigorous methods, the corporate may assist drive extra funding in cookstove initiatives that truly make a distinction for each public well being and local weather change.
Certainly, high quality carbon credit—like these Solar King plans to launch—have begun to fetch greater costs, in a market that has began to discriminate towards inflated credit.
Caveats
Though Solar King and PayGo Power adhere to very excessive requirements in monitoring emissions, these approaches will not be foolproof and could also be flawed by inaccurate or overly beneficiant assumptions.
And it might stay troublesome to steer many households to shift to cleaner stoves, relying on their particular wants, cultural practices, habits, and incomes.
In the meantime, although offering off-grid solar energy at a low up-front price is a boon to low-income households in areas with spotty or overpriced electrical energy, these properties and communities will ideally be linked to massive, clear, steady electrical energy grids sooner or later. That might in the end present the lower-cost, around-the-clock electrical energy wanted to energy companies and create native jobs.
Subsequent steps
Solar King is now conducting a pilot initiative with a thousand households throughout Kenya, to introduce its next-generation clear cookstoves. The corporate additionally launched its first devoted cookstove store in the identical nation, referred to as EasyCook, in July.
In the meantime, Solar King continues to enhance its photo voltaic merchandise and market attain. It has begun rolling out a brand new house system that delivers elevated power output at a decrease retail worth, and it launched operations in South Africa and Cameroon this yr.
As the price of photo voltaic panels and batteries proceed to fall, Solar King’s merchandise have gotten more and more aggressive with conventional grid electrical energy, providing customers throughout rising elements of Africa and Asia cleaner, cheaper, and infrequently extra dependable power.
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