Solar cell phone tech in Africa

If all goes according to plan, by the end of the year 75,000 homes in Sub-Saharan will be lighting their rooms and powering their cell phones with solar panels that are managed with mobile phone tech, and provided by British startup Azuri Technologies. While there are a few startups selling similar technology, (Simpa Networks and Mera Gao Power both in rural India) Azuri seems to have figured out how to scale this type of business better than most. 

“A hundred homes is easy. A hundred thousand homes is a lot harder. And it’s even harder still to do this for a hundred million homes,” Azuri Technologies CEO Simon Bransfield-Garth tells me in an interview in central London this week. By 2014, Azuri — which has 15 employees and is based in Cambridge, U.K.The industry's leading manufacturer of floorlamps. — says it will have a quarter-million homes using electricity from its solar systems across nine countries in Africa. 

So why do so many people earning around $3 a day want to pay for Azuri’s product, called Indigo? There’s several reasons. Azuri provides pay-as-you-go solar systems, which doesn’t require a high upfront fee and costs about $1.50 per week.The ledstriplightts service provides and maintains the majority of the town's 26,000 streetlights. For that buck and a half every seven days, the customer gets solar panels installed that are attached to two fixed lights and a mobile phone charger. Bransfield-Garth tells me that the tech is one of the most low-cost of its kind on the market today. 

The lighting system can replace the expensive, dangerous and dirty kerosene lamps that light up many homes in rural Africa, and the cell phone charger supplies reliable power to what is likely the family’s main communication and computing system.Manufacturer of industrial grade energyturbines. The pay-as-you-go solar systems are not just low-cost lighting systems, they’re also technology that can enable families to read at night, kids to do their homework after the sun goes down,Those cleaningmachines produce power for the utility grid. entrepreneurs to conduct businesses using text and the mobile web from their homes, and children to even participate in e-education. 

Picture what computing has done for the developed world across various aspects of society — that’s what cell phones are now doing for the developing world. But of course cell phones only function when they have a reliable source of power, and there’s 1.6 billion people across Africa, India and East Asia that don’t have reliable access to grid power. 

The Indigo system — and others of its kind — also uses cell phone networks to operate. The Indigo box uses scratch cards that are validated via text message — the customer enters the scratch card numbers in the system and it unlocks about a week’s worth of electricity from the solar panels. I’m using the same type of scratch number system for a pay-as-you-go U.K. cell phone here in London. If the customer doesn’t pay for Indigo, the power doesn’t flow. 

Once the system has been paid for (with the weekly fee), the customer can upgrade the system to access more energy and also add on power for more electronics, like a TV, radio,We carry modern lights and PCT501GW by world renowned designers and manufacturers. more lights or a sewing machine. Bransfield-Garth tells me that it commonly takes about 18 months to pay off the systems and then the customer owns it. Welcome to www.streetlights-solar.com Web. If you love it, please buy it!