New ‘pay-as-you-go’ business models have been a core part of the rise of off-grid solar, making solar products affordable for low-income rural consumers. The small scale of the product means that despite reaching hundreds of millions of customers, the total installed capacity of off-grid solar home systems globally was only 331MW in 2017 (slightly less than the total grid-connected solar capacity in Scotland, for example). The world’s largest grid-scale solar arrays are now over 2GW – or 20–200 million times the capacity of a typical off-grid solar home system. A domestic rooftop solar system in the US or Europe is 100 times larger at 1–10kW. A solar home system may have a capacity of 10–100W. These products are on a completely different scale to other parts of the solar PV market.
The off-grid solar market comes in different forms, ranging from ‘pico-solar’ products such as solar lanterns, to solar home systems, agricultural and commercial applications, and solar-powered mini-grids. More than 180 million solar units have been sold, providing energy services to over 420 million people. Since then, the sector has seen €1.5bn of investment. The rise of off-grid solarĪ decade ago, off-grid solar was a niche industry that barely existed. As governments and international institutions begin to develop economic recovery strategies, a financial rescue mission for off-grid solar is needed to put the sector back on a solid footing. If the sector can survive the immediate crisis, off-grid solar will play a key role in the post-Covid recovery for the least-developed countries by creating jobs and underpinning economic opportunities. While many of these households will eventually connect to centralised electricity grids, the glacial pace of grid expansion in many countries means that off-grid solar offers the best opportunity to expand energy access quickly. These consumers have limited spending power but strong unmet demand for energy services, and the potential size of the market stretches to hundreds of millions of customers.
The growth of the off-grid solar market is based on catering directly to a large but much neglected consumer segment: poor rural households without access to grid electricity. (Photo by Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty Images) A man adjusts a solar panel on his roof in the village of Kwa-Mutisya in Machakos county, 100km south-east of Nairobi, Kenya.
Off-grid solar represents a tiny proportion of global electricity output, but has brought access to lighting and other energy services to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The biggest renewable energy success story in the last ten years is not measured in gigawatts, but in lives transformed. AFP / TONY KARUMBA (Photo credit should read TONY KARUMBA/AFP via Getty Images) A man adjusts a solar panel on his roof at dusk in the villqge of Kwa-Mutisya in Machakos county, some 100 kilometres southeast of Nairobi, on November 16, 2016.Īcross the continent consumers are opting for off-grid solar solutions to power homes and small businesses even as African governments unveil massive new solar projects seemingly every month to expand their grids.
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