2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Sun King connects low-income households to clean energy
Sun King is helping poor households across Asia and Africa access reliable, clean power and healthier ways of cooking.
Accessing clean sources of energy has always been a challenge for low-income communities worldwide, given the high up-front costs. At least hundreds of millions of people around the world have unreliable or no access to the electricity grid, forcing many of them to spend as much as 10% of their incomes on dirty fuels—like kerosene and diesel—that harm both their health and the environment.
One work-around for this challenge is to allow households to pay for clean energy in small, affordable amounts as they use it.
This is what Sun King has been able to deliver. By providing solar panels, handheld solar-powered lamps, batteries, and home systems that power lights and devices to communities in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, it says, it offers reliable renewable electricity to some 40 million people. Its pay-as-you-go business model allows households to spend as little as $0.15 per day.
Now, having acquired PayGo Energy in 2023, Sun King is expanding its product portfolio into clean cooking.
PayGo’s stoves run on liquefied petroleum gas, which produces less of the health-damaging and climate-warming pollution generated by charcoal, biomass, and similar fuels used to heat basic stoves in many homes. The household costs for the stoves and fuel are subsidized by carbon credits that the company earns for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, through a voluntary carbon offsets program.
Crucially, PayGo has earned high marks from academic experts for developing household cookstoves that reliably reduce indoor air pollution and climate emissions. Sun King says it’s also developing other cooking appliances, like pressure cookers, that could run on the renewable electricity it provides.
Key indicators
- Industry: Renewable energy
- Founded: 2008
- Headquarters: Nairobi, Kenya
- Notable fact: Sun King supplies solar products to more than 40 million people in 10 African and two Asian countries.
Potential for impact
Sun King’s whole range of product lines helps cut the emissions driving climate change.
For instance, it has already sold 23 million solar products to previous users of kerosene lamps, each of which can pump out around a ton of carbon dioxide a decade.
And by reducing the need to collect biomass to produce household light, heat, or fuel for cooking, the company can help reduce deforestation as well as the emissions that occur from burning plant matter.
Cooking with wood and charcoal is a major contributor to global warming, responsible for approximately 2% of worldwide carbon emissions. The particulate pollution it releases also kills millions of people annually.
Voluntary carbon markets for clean cookstoves will only work if the programs are conducted in a transparent and credible manner; such programs have come under severe criticism for inflating the climate benefits of the appliances, in part by overestimating how much they’re actually used. But PayGo was among a few cookstove projects that researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found did meet stringent quality criteria, in part by “metering” actual usage of cleaner replacement stoves. The stoves also use a fuel that meets World Health Organization health standards for indoor air pollution.
By operating in more rigorous ways, the company could help drive more investment in cookstove projects that actually make a difference for both public health and climate change.
Indeed, quality carbon credits—like those Sun King plans to release—have begun to fetch higher prices, in a market that has started to discriminate against inflated credits.
Caveats
Even though Sun King and PayGo Energy adhere to very high standards in monitoring emissions, these approaches are not foolproof and may be flawed by inaccurate or overly generous assumptions.
And it may remain difficult to persuade many households to shift to cleaner stoves, depending on their specific needs, cultural practices, habits, and incomes.
Meanwhile, though providing off-grid solar power at a low up-front cost is a boon to low-income households in regions with spotty or overpriced electricity, these homes and communities will ideally be connected to large, clean, stable electricity grids in the future. That would ultimately provide the lower-cost, around-the-clock electricity needed to power businesses and create local jobs.
Next steps
Sun King is now conducting a pilot initiative with a thousand households across Kenya, to introduce its next-generation clean cookstoves. The company also launched its first dedicated cookstove shop in the same country, known as EasyCook, in July.
Meanwhile, Sun King continues to improve its solar products and market reach. It has begun rolling out a new home system that delivers increased energy output at a lower retail price, and it launched operations in South Africa and Cameroon this year.
As the cost of solar panels and batteries continue to fall, Sun King’s products are becoming increasingly competitive with traditional grid electricity, offering consumers across growing parts of Africa and Asia cleaner, cheaper, and often more reliable energy.
Explore the 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch.
