Secure prepaid payment platform for clean energy
- Summary
- The Problem 400 million Indians and 1.6 billion worldwide lack access to the electricity grid. They are already spending $50+ billion per year on lousy solutions, such as kerosene fuel for small lanterns. The good news is that effective decentralized energy solutions already exist, such as household solar energy systems and community-scale solar “microgrids”. The problem is that these clean energy technologies involve significant up-front costs and therefore must be financed. Consumers have a proven willingness to pay for energy services, but investors are needed to finance the upfront CAPEX. And to unlock the required capital, investors need to know that their investments will yield the required returns. Our Solution Simpa offers a secure, prepaid payment platform that makes clean energy solutions simple, affordable, and investible. Our platform does two things: It enables attractive pay-as-you-go pricing for consumers and it provides risk mitigation functions for the investors that ultimately finance the CAPEX. We do this in emerging markets, such as India, where demand for energy is growing fast - and clean, distributed energy solutions have particular advantages. Our Technology Our patent pending technology + service + finance platform leverages ubiquitous mobile phones to unlock demand from consumers while providing risk mitigation for the investors that finance the solar equipment. The technology platform consists of a very low cost prepaid meter supported by sophisticated cloud-based software. The technology can be embedded inside standalone products such as solar home systems (“Simpa Inside”) and is also being offered to solar microgrid developers as an extremely flexible metering, customer and revenue management solution.Stage of development : At usable level
- Technology Benefits
- Simpa has initially introduced its “pay-as-you-go” pricing to household energy systems. Users pre-pay based on actual usage and each payment adds up towards the total purchase price of the solar home system. Consumers can send payments using a mobile phone. Once fully paid, the solar home system unlocks and delivers free electricity for the expected 10-year life of the product. We transform an energy expenditure into an asset purchase. We offer consumers the opportunity for ownership of their energy resource and break their dependence on expensive, unhealthy, and inefficient sources of light and electricity. To do this we have invented, built and field-tested the core technology that regulates usage of an electronic device based upon the receipt of payments. Specifically, we are introducing our patent pending Progressive Purchase™ technology – a combination of product-embedded hardware plus cloud-based software that enables a consumer to purchase a solar home system at minimal upfront cost and then to make a series of small payments over time – using a mobile phone – to complete the purchase of their system. Our novel Progressive Purchase™ model delivers on our vision of “radical affordability” – defined as affordability across three axes: the initial purchase price; the total cost of ownership; and the flexibility of expenditures over time. Progressive Purchase “Progressive Purchase” is a new pricing model that shares some characteristics of the familiar “prepaid”, “pay as you go”, and “installment plan” pricing models. Under Progressive Purchase™, the consumer makes a series of payments, each of which unlocks the solar home system for a paid amount of energy consumption (Kwh). Once the prepaid consumption is exhausted, the solar home system is temporarily disabled until another payment is made. Once the consumer has fully paid the total purchase price of the product, full functionality is restored and the product is permanently unlocked. The Progressive Purchase™ pricing model is enabled by the Simpa Regulator, a tamper-proof, system-integrated microcontroller and user interface that regulates the function of our solar home systems based on proof of payments, and the Simpa Revenue Management System, a centralized software solution in the “cloud”, accessible via SMS gateway and over the internet, for payment processing and accounts settlement.
- Goods and Services
- Alternative energy production > Solar energy
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