Banks fund Greenlight Planet in Sh8b deal deal
Off-grid solar provider Greenlight Planet yesterday unveiled a $75 million (Sh8.3 billion) facility from a consortium of lenders to finance its sustainable energy programmes.
The fund by Standard Bank Group, Citi, CDC Group and Norfund becomes one of the largest syndicated sustainable finance deals in the region to be provided in local currency with the transaction expected to see the firm expand access to off-grid solar solutions to Kenyan communities across the country.
Pay-as-you-go
The amount is further expected to help meet the firm’s ambitious plan to reach an additional 10 million households globally in the next 5 years by enabling households to afford “pay-as-you-go” solar home systems through digital financing.
“Over 600 million off-grid homes will spend over a thousand dollars each on smoky, carbon-emitting kerosene lamps for household light in the next decade.
Many of them simply need short-term purchase financing to be able to afford one of our clean, rooftop and solar systems to light their home and power appliances,” said Anish Thakkar, Co-founder of Greenlight Planet Kenya.
The announcement comes amid concerns of high cost of power – a critical factor that is gradually seeing most Kenyans shift to other alternative sources of power connections.
It is estimated that the outright cost of a typical home installation ranges from Sh 300,000 to Sh 360,000, which is a 64 percent average decrease, with solar panels rapidly spreading over Kenyan rooftops.
The same concerns have also been raised by local manufactures who argue that new taxes, high cost of electricity, high import declaration fees among other levies only add to their woes by reducing profitability and slowing down recovery of business hit hard by Covid-19 measures.
Greenlight Planet Kenya is a distributor and financier of rooftop solar home systems for off-grid and weak-grid homes.
