的现收现付Joins Sun King to Scale Clean Cooking in Africa and Asia

Sun King’s recent acquisition of PayGo Energy represents a decisive advancement in clean cooking technology for off-grid and underserved communities. Sun King is the largest off-grid solar products company in Africa and Asia, with mature distribution networks and supply chains. PayGo, meanwhile, has pioneered pay-as-you-go technology and services for liquefied petroleum gas. The newly combined duo have promised to merge their strengths and speed the transition to clean cooking technologies in kitchens that now cook with charcoal, wood and kerosene.

Something new in clean cooking

PayGo能源首次招募烹饪气体customers in 2016 in Mukuru, a large informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. The now-defunct magazineDemand | ASME Global Development Review发布启动t的深入探索hat occupied six pages of a publication that printed too few editions before its demise. The article captured PayGo’s nascence, a startup testing prototypes and seeking seed funding. PayGo later went on to attract Series A investment before its acquisition by Sun King. But in its earliest days, PayGo ignored convention and stumbled upon a creative marketing technique as it fought to introduce an unknown technology in some of the world’s most impoverished communities.

AsDemandreports, PayGo’s ‘s engineering lead at the time, Fausto Marcigot, installed clean cooking technology in Mukuru, an informal settlement in Nairobi home to 750,000 people. Mr. Marcigot connected a gas burner to a metered canister of liquefied petroleum gas, or propane. The standard fuels in Mukuru and Nairobi’s other informal settlements are charcoal and other kinds of biomass, and kerosene. There is no infrastructure for delivering gas directly into kitchens. After installing a gas burner and a PayGo LPG canister, Mr. Marcigot boiled a kettle of water and the residents invited friends and family for a tea party. Thus, an energy startup in Africa launched a first-of-its-kind innovation with an organic marketing method reminiscent of US Tupperware parties in the 1950s.

A startup built on a meter and a service

The meters are PayGo’s technological innovation and one of the pillars upon which the startup was built. With the meter, a standard canister of LPG can release only the quantity of gas that a user has bought.

The original meter includes a GSM communications unit, a gas measurement system and shut-off valve. The three components are bundled into a pre-certified and explosion-proof casing, important for an electrical device mounted on a gas canister.

The meter attaches to a standard gas canister with a tamper-proof lock. The gas, in turn, connects to a burner that PayGo buys from a third-party manufacturer and packages together with the gas.

Customers pay with their phones. PayGo’s meter is integrated with M-Pesa, a nearly ubiquitous mobile money platform in Kenya. PayGo remotely monitors its meters, calculates the gas that remains in each canister and plans deliveries to maintain an uninterrupted supply of gas in each home.

The arrangement allows households to pay for gas a little at a time rather than for an entire canister. Buying and refilling whole canisters is out of reach and too expensive for the households that PayGo’s technology serves.

“Here in Kenya, a lot of the population lives on a day-to-day basis. They often get paid on a daily or weekly basis, and so they can’t really afford a full cylinder of gas, ” Mr. Marcigot toldDemand. “What they can afford is a small daily payment.”

It’s no good providing one tank of gas with a pay-as-you-go meter if you can’t supply gas on a continuous basis.

If the meter is one pillar upon which PayGo was built, the delivery service is the second pillar.

When PayGo launched, a surge of energy startups were peddling solar power through pay-as-you-go business models, and the trend influenced PayGo’s approach. The differences between gas and solar, however, presented at least one complication.

“It’s no good providing one tank of gas with a pay-as-you-go meter if you can’t then supply gas on a continuous basis.” Mr. Marcigot says. “That’s a challenge that the solar companies don’t face, because once you [hook] up your panel, as long as the sun is shining, you can continue to provide the utility.”

Mr. Marcigot’s comparison to solar companies proved prescient. Seven years after making the comment toDemand, PayGo joined Sun King.

Why gas?

Transitioning to clean cooking through modern stoves and fuels provides at least four kinds of benefits. First, it’s cheaper. Customers who switch from charcoal to PayGo’s gas service have saved 25-30 percent on their daily fuel costs. Traditional cooking methods also incur high costs, with many African households spending about a quarter of their income on wood and charcoal, more than they spend on power and light.

The other benefits are less immediate, but no less important. Clean cooking reduces carbon emissions, decreases deforestation and clears up indoor air which, by extension improves public health.

Clean cooking reduces carbon emissions, decreases deforestation and clears up indoor air.

近three billion peopleglobally rely on open wood fires and charcoal stoves for cooking. Their cooking fuelscontribute significantly to global warming,占大约2%的全球碳水化合物n emissions. In their announcement of the union with PayGo, Sun King points out that 2 percent is roughly equal to the carbon footprint ofthe entire global air travel industry.

One important aspect of the benefits of clean fuels is thatthey extend largely to women. Cleaner technology improves outcomes among an underserved demographic living within the larger underserved communities. Women are particularly prone to respiratory disease linked to their exposure to smoke and emissions in the kitchen. Moreover, collecting wood and tending to firesdisproportionately burden women.