San Francisco, CA; Nairobi, Kenya; New Delhi, India – With 120,000 units sold, almost all within the first six months of its October 2016 global launch, d.light’s D30 Pay-Go solar home system is proving to be the fastest pay-as-you-go off-grid solar product to reach scale. The company announced that sales continue to grow exponentially, and they are currently registering 800 new households a day.
“We’ve been thrilled to see how quickly our customers have migrated with d.light from solar lanterns to our larger Pay-Go systems, and we are extremely grateful to our many partners who have helped us bring clean, safe and reliable solar power connectivity to families without, or with little, access to the grid,” said d.light CEO Ned Tozun. “With the highest number of daily unit sales and impact of any off-grid solar company, we have been able to leverage our base of over 65 million happy d.light customers, as well as our existing distribution networks on the ground, to enable us to get to scale our Pay-Go solar home systems even faster than we imagined, enabling families to move from small task lights and lanterns to the grid-like experience of our solar home systems. And, this is just the beginning: we will be continuing to bring exciting innovations to the space to grow the market further and reach even more people. Stay tuned!”
d.light’s D30 system operates like personal power grids for homes or small businesses. It includes a solar panel, mobile phone charger, solar lights, light switches, a torch and an FM radio. The lights can last up to 17 hours on the low setting and are 12 times brighter than kerosene. Payment plans vary depending on the country.
In Kenya, for example, customers pay USD $25 down, and then 40 cents per day for a year, without incurring any interest. Customers can make payments using a wide variety of mobile money platforms. Each device is unlocked to produce power when payment is received and remains unlocked as long as payments are made on time. Once paid in full, the Pay-Go solar home system is unlocked forever and customers then own their systems.
For Frederick Nzioka Mutuku, a 17-year-old student living in Machakos County, Kenya, d.light’s D30 system helped support his academic success by providing high quality and reliable lighting, so he could study well into the night. This was a struggle with kerosene lighting as its quality was very dim and because the fuel was so expensive that his family would use it sparingly to make it last several nights. Since Frederick was able to study longer under LED lighting provided by his family’s D30 system, he passed his high school exams with high marks and is awaiting acceptance into a local university.
“Total has a target to sell five million off-grid solar products in Africa by 2020, impacting 25 million people on the continent. We are constantly working on innovative and affordable new solutions to meet our customers growing needs. d.light’s Pay-Go D30 home system, as well as portable single and multi-use lanterns, are pivotal in helping us achieve this goal. We have been partnering with d.light since 2010 and always look forward to helping them bring new solar solutions to market,” said Philippe Cabus, Director of Access to Energy at Total.
As an early pioneer in solar lighting and home systems, d.light paved the way for the development of the off-grid solar industry, including Pay-Go solar, and is now the industry’s largest solar brand for off-grid solar. The company has sold a total of 350,000 solar home systems over the last four years, inclusive of all previous models, some of which are not enabled with the Pay-Go system. d.light is the leading provider of off-grid solar solutions and has commanding market share in emerging regions, particularly in Africa and Asia. To date, the company has impacted over 65 million lives and aims to empower 100 million people with affordable and reliable solar by 2020.