Solar for small-holder farmers made affordable through innovative co-design and financing – lessons learnt

Abstract

A technological revolution in both the cost and performance of solar photovoltaic (PV) technology has transformed the landscape of generating electricity directly from the sun in the last decade. Innovation combined with government incentives and policies led to massive investments which in turn fueled a virtuous cycle of declining PV costs with ever larger production volumes. The core electricity producing technology is scale neutral- a single solar module roughly the size of a typical door in a building, or a solar power plant with thousands of door-sized modules, all rely on the same solar cells.

They are all equally efficient at converting the sun's energy into electricity. This paper describes a case study of using the solar PV technology for small farmers in Senegal to reduce their costs, carbon foot print and collaborate with other farmers. The paper also gives recommendations for farmers in other developing countries based on the lessons learnt in this study. The lessons include benefit from bulk procurement, significantly lower per module cost of installation, logistics, transaction costs and interconnection to the grid.