Payment-Enforcement Technology and Business Models for High-Impact Borehole Solarisation in Tanzania

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Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£1,554,460

March 1, 2023

Feb. 28, 2025

From 2019-2022 in NorthernTanzania, SVRG and OMASI collaborated on an EnergyCatalyst6 grant to bring innovative integrated-energy-services and productive-use technologies to marginalised Maasai communities.

The project has been a great success, with innovative solar-energy and productive-use technology installed at 5 boreholes (displacing diesel-generators), two community-minigrids and business-hubs, two schools and a community radio-station, directly impacting more than 12,000 people.

The technology with highest impact and best commercial potential is the solarisation of existing diesel-powered boreholes. We are able to install innovative solar-technology instead of the diesel-system, and powers additional high-value productive-uses like flour milling. And because the boreholes have been operating for years, we are able to access their records and set repayment-plans for the operators or the community borehole-committees that are cheaper than the amount they were paying for diesel monthly.

Not a single one of our installations has not at some time in the last three years defaulted on their repayments. There are several reasons for this: maasai culture, remoteness of the sites and distance from us, the reluctance to make payments to foreigners a higher priority than helping kin. But the main reason is that it is easy to default, and there is less moral obligation to pay, since the systems continue to operate whether or not they make repayments.

In this project, we intend to research and test technology-solutions to integrate into our systems that could remotely disable them in the event of repayment defaults. This is more difficult than it sounds. It is easy to block a phone, a solar-home-system, or even a Tanesco metered grid-connection, since they are sealed units. A 50kW solar-power system with inverters mounted in a building is hard to control. Remote-controlled switches in fuse boxes can easily be bypassed. This is why there is no readily-available current solution for controlling large component-based systems in this fashion. We will look at alternatives for performing the control function, and how to make them non-bypassable, and then test their performance to revise our business and technology model. If successful, this will remove the single greatest barrier to our ability to scale-up this very affordable and simple borehole-solarisation technology, which has immediate economic and carbon community-impact