SunWorks Africa: Grid-Connect Home Solar for Civil Servants Program

SunWorks Africa is launching a transformative Grid-Connect Home Solar Program targeting over 300,000 civil servant households across Cameroon. This initiative directly addresses the critical challenge of unreliable electricity access and energy poverty, where these households currently experience daily 6-8 hour blackouts.

The Challenge We Address: Despite being connected to the national grid, civil servant homes in Cameroon suffer from severe power outages, leading to reliance on expensive and polluting alternatives like generators and kerosene. This not only impacts their quality of life but also hinders productivity and economic potential.

Our Innovative Solution: We propose the installation of 5 kWh grid-connected solar systems for each household. Our unique model is built on several pillars:

• Reliable Power: Ensures continuous and stable electricity supply, even during grid outages, through battery storage and intelligent management.

• Energy Buy-Back Mechanism: In a pioneering partnership with the national electricity utility, ENEO, households can sell their excess solar energy back to the national grid. This provides a crucial revenue stream, significantly reducing their energy bills and offering tangible financial empowerment.

• Accessible Financing: The direct cost of system procurement and installation is financed through consumer loans provided by our partner banks to the civil servants, making the solution affordable and scalable.

• MySun Mobile Application: Our proprietary digital platform, developed with Nexinch, enables real-time monitoring of energy generation and consumption, manages the energy buy-back credits, and provides users with complete transparency over their energy usage and financial benefits. It also facilitates remote diagnostics and support.

Key Impacts & Contributions: At its full scale, this program is projected to deliver:

• Total Power Capacity: 1.5 GW of distributed clean energy.

• Annual Energy Production: 547.5 GWh of clean electricity.

• CO2 Emission Savings: Approximately 350,400 tCO2e mitigated per year.

• Socio-Economic Benefits:

  • Ensures reliable power access, improving quality of life, health, and educational opportunities.

  • Provides significant financial relief and potential income for civil servant households.

  • Creates substantial green jobs (e.g., 420 direct installer jobs in Year 1 alone), fostering local technical expertise.

  • Contributes to gender equality by empowering women through improved energy access and financial control.

• Grid Stability: The distributed generation actively supports grid stability by injecting clean power and reducing demand peaks.

Our Partnerships: We have secured strategic partnerships with:

• Partner Banks: Providing the essential financing to make the systems accessible to our target demographic.

• ENEO: Crucial for grid integration and the implementation of the energy buy-back mechanism.

• Nexinch: Our dedicated software development partner, ensuring the robust functionality and continuous improvement of the MySun application.

The SunWorks Africa Grid-Connect Home Solar Program is a financially sustainable, technologically advanced, and socially impactful model for accelerating energy transition in Cameroon and beyond. We are seeking to connect with investors, technology partners, and development organizations interested in scaling this proven solution.