The partnership adds seven projects in Rwanda, spread across education, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, hospitality, and agriculture sectors, two additional projects in Zambia and one upcoming project in Uganda, to the Solarise Africa portfolio. In September, Solarise Africa raised a further $10m Series B investment led by Proparco, alongside existing investors, EAV and EDFI ElectriFI to drive Africa’s clean energy expansion. Solarise Africa expects to power the continent to avoid frequent outages that greatly hamper productivity. The firm provides manageable installment payments and short payback periods to firms so that they avoid expensive upfront investment. Earlier, Solarise Africa held the second closing of its Series A round of funding led by EAV and ElectriFI, a flexible financial facility funded by the European Union. “The Solarise team is a customer-centric, responsive and predictable partner, which aligns with our company’s approach to working with customers”, said David John Frenkil, Founder and Managing Director of Centennial. “By partnering with Solarise, we are offering both battery energy storage and solar projects to commercial and industrial facilities. These projects are fully financed with turnkey engineering and asset management services. Centennial’s projects are designed to improve our customers’ profitability, stabilize their power supply and support their commitments to achieving sustainability goals.” He continued by saying that an example is a portfolio of HIV testing and treatment facilities that uses energy-intensive freezers required for storing vaccines. By using solar and battery energy storage, the customer has reduced power costs while also ensuring the operation of the cold storage for vaccines which support the treatment of over 2,200 at-risk patients every month. “Our solutions allow business customers to bridge the financing hurdle and reduce dependability on an unstable power grid. This greatly improves up-time and productivity” said Patrik Huber, Co-Founder and Managing Director for East Africa at Solarise Africa. “One of our new projects power one of the largest commercial buildings in Rwanda. Sustainable energy provides reliable electricity that reduced its power costs by over 50%. That is the kind of impact solar can have and we are proud to help make it happen.” Solarise Africa is currently active in five countries and plans to significantly expand its portfolio throughout 2021.
