Why M-KOPA Solar Is Winning Award After Award (Video Interview)
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M-KOPA Solar has apparently had little problem winning awards. You can scan through the awards here. Most recently, it won the prestigious and highly competitive Zayed Future Energy Prize (in the SME category). Following the Zayed Future Energy Prize awards ceremony*, I had the chance to interview M-KOPA’s managing director and cofounder, Jesse Moore. He explains some of M-KOPA’s big achievements, its inspiration, and its biggest goals. Check it out:
And here’s a fun bonus video (you have to watch the interview above to understand):
*Full Disclosure: Masdar covered my trip to Abu Dhabi for the Zayed Future Energy Prize and Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week in 2014 and 2015, and I do some contract work for the clean energy corporation.
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I’m more interested in their innovations and technology rather than their awards. This article didn’t show me either only the bragging. It would have been useful if a couple of sentences explained what their technology is and why it won awards.
It’s in the video, no? They bring solar to people in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda via pay-as-you-go solar built on sophisticated mobile payments software that they developed.
And it’s not about the awards they won (which I didn’t list) but about the fact that they have brought solar to 150,000 homes in <2.5 years, and are now serving ~500 homes a day.
This is really fantastic and heartwarming news. Such an antidote to all the doom and gloom we see all the time making everybody miserable.
Babam, they aren’t really a technology company. They don’t make phones or the PV they sell. They came up with a way to get PV to the masses of people who don’t have cash to buy up front, or credit in the sense that a large bank would deal with them. In a way they took the products that are used by non-profit like SunFund and married it to mobile pay-as-you go. Their focus is on building up the “boots on the ground” (ok maybe no shoes) to get the PV out to the remote villages that can greatly benefit from them. They are adding 500 homes a week now, and planning to scale.
Adding on a bit, these micro-solar programs started in Bangladesh. And also started slow.
By 2013 Bangladesh had over provided over 2 million installations and was adding another 80,000 a month.