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(Bloomberg) — Sun King, the world’s largest off-grid solar company, plans to sell products in Madagascar and targets connecting 1.5 million customers by 2030.
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The expansion into a 12th country in Africa, which will cost as much as $50 million, is expected to benefit from some World Bank funding. The company is seeking to align its push with a program led by the multilateral lender and the African Development Bank to connect 300 million people on the continent to electricity by 2030.
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“Electrification rates here are generally low,” Wale Aboyade, vice president for public affairs at Sun King, said in an interview from Antananarivo, the capital of the island nation. “It’s not connected to the rest of the continent, so they can’t exactly get power through power pools and imported diesel is expensive. So our solution is coming in at the right time.”
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About 560 million Africans live without power, or about 80% of the global total. Sun King, founded in 2007 as Greenlight Planet by three University of Illinois graduates, supplies an array of equipment including the batteries and small solar panels used across Africa, where access to national grids is limited and power supply is often erratic. Its goods are sold on a pay-as-you-go basis, with payments made through mobile-money platforms.
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The target of 1.5 million connections forms a large part of the 3.5 million connections Madagascar has forecast are needed for stand-alone off-grid equipment as part of its so-called compact signed with the World Bank and African Development Bank.
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“This investment supports our national-energy compact,” Energy Minister Radonirina Rabearimanga said in a statement. It is our “ambition to reach 80% electricity access by 2030” up from about 39% now, he said.
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