Irrigation
Surface and borehole pumping, solar direct-drive and storage-backed, sized to the crop and the irrigation window rather than to a nameplate figure.
Agriculture & Agribusiness
Power is the difference between selling a crop and selling a product.
01
The economics
A farmer selling raw maize receives roughly $150 per ton. Milled on site, the same crop becomes maize meal at approximately $450 per ton plus bran at around $200. The gap between those numbers is electricity and a machine. The same logic runs through every crop and every step of value addition a farm or cooperative can capture on site rather than surrendering to an intermediary.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, post-harvest losses run 20 to 40 percent, largely because storage and processing lack reliable power — food that was grown and then thrown away for want of electricity. Reliable irrigation can raise yields 20 to 50 percent by removing dependence on rainfall timing.
Agriculture is where the case for reliable power is easiest to make and hardest to deliver, because the loads are dispersed, seasonal, and unforgiving.
Sources: World Bank, small-scale solar for agricultural and economic impact · IRENA and FAO, renewable energy for agri-food systems.
02
What we power
Cold storage and cold chain
Cold rooms, chillers, and pack-house cooling for produce, dairy, poultry, and fish, with storage sized to hold temperature through the night and through an outage.
Processing and value addition
Milling, hulling, threshing, pressing, grinding, and packing. Motor loads with high starting current, which is a specification problem the catalogue approach routinely gets wrong.
Drying and curing
Grain, cocoa, cassava, and spice drying, replacing open-air drying that loses crop to rain and contamination.
Aggregation and out-grower centres
Collection points serving many smallholders, where power, cold storage, and a processing line are shared infrastructure.
Livestock, poultry, and aquaculture
Ventilation, incubation, lighting regimes, aeration, and water pumping — loads where a few hours of failure is a mortality event rather than an inconvenience.
03
Why module-level architecture suits farms
Farm sites are shaded by trees and outbuildings, coated in dust and harvest debris, extended piecemeal as income allows, and serviced irregularly. Panel-level conversion holds output under shading and soiling mismatch, isolates a fault instead of taking the whole array offline, and allows a farmer to start with one pump or one cold room and expand without redesigning the system.
04
Agri-Power Initiative
Our programme applying decentralized solar to irrigation, processing, and cold storage for smallholder farmers, designed around metered supply so that farmers pay for power in proportion to what they use rather than facing a capital cost they cannot carry. Pilot design covers sites in Nigeria, Mali, and Zambia.
Who we work with
- 01Commercial farms and agricultural estates
- 02Cooperatives and farmer associations
- 03Out-grower schemes and aggregators
- 04Food and agro-processors
- 05Cold chain and logistics operators
- 06Agricultural development programs and their implementing partners
Impact: SDG 2, SDG 7, SDG 8