Off-grid solar: a new development paradigm for rural <a href="https://absafricatv.com/who-will-pay-to-belong-to-south-africa/” title=”Who will pay to belong to South Africa?”>Africa
T. Patrick Walsh on Sun King’s plans to bring power to 200mn underserved people by 2030
T. Patrick Walsh has no doubt. “This is the way it is going to get done for 90 per cent of people who are off-grid: they are going to get access to electricity through solar power.”
Since co-founding Sun King in 2007 with Anish Thakkar, Walsh has worked to bring affordable distributed solar kits to millions of households in rural areas. About 20 years later, Sun King is installing 330,000 solar kits per month in 11 countries in Africa and two in Asia.
Walsh concedes that power grids will still be needed in high-density urban areas, but also that “the leapfrogging that you’re starting to see now is that in many instances there’s not a great argument from an economic perspective to build out an electrical grid in a rural area”.
“If you have the latest technology and reasonable access to financing then it’s actually more affordable per kilowatt hour to deliver electricity with a distributed solar kit [than other centralised or fossil-based options].”
We’re really trying to figure out how to make this technology affordable for people who are the most underserved
At a time when economies the world over are electrifying, the UN’s latest Energy Progress Report estimated there are still 655mn people without access to electricity in the world, with 560mn of them in sub-Saharan Africa alone.
“We’re really trying to figure out how to make this technology affordable for people who are the most underserved […] We feel like it’s where we can have the most impact on people’s lives,” he adds as he details plans to launch Sun King in other African countries like Ethiopia and Madagascar.
The company, which has raised more than $900mn since launch, has the ambition to reach another 200mn people in rural Africa and Asia by 2030. On top of that, it wants to stay with its customer base as their needs evolve as they gain access to stable electricity supply. In this perspective, Sun King has plans to establish its own production footprint in sub-Saharan Africa (at the moment the solar kits are sourced in China) to assemble locally appliances that can run on the electricity generated by the solar kits.
