solar

Hyundai launches home charging ecosystem as part of EV push • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 20, 2022Posted in Electrum, hyundai, LA Auto Show, solar, TransportationNo Comments

Hyundai announced this week at the LA Auto Show a new way for its customers to charge at home as part of the company’s efforts to woo a new group of EV buyers. Hyundai Home, the automaker calls it, incorporates solar panels, energy storage and EV charging for Hyundai owners. Hyundai announced a partnership with Electrum, a solar panel, home battery and heat pump installer, which will help customers in 16 states find the right power installers and systems for their EV charging needs. With the new partnership, consumers in Arizona, California, Colorado. Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington can now work with Electrum advisors to find the best and most affordable power solutions for them. Prior to this week’s announcement, dealers were helping customers get in touch with local installers and power suppliers in order to get charging and storage set up for their new Hyundai EVs like the Ioniq 5, according to Ian Tupper, the senior group manager of strategic environmental partnerships at Hyundai. “With Hyundai Home, we’re really trying to democratize, not only EV charging and being able to adopt an electric vehicle, but the entire ecosystem around it. We want to make it easy for customers to go solar to get energy storage and to eventually use all those systems together to reduce their energy bill,” Tupper told ZebethMedia during an interview at the LA Auto Show. Making EV charging more accessible As the U.S. increasingly makes a push to reduce carbon emissions, especially those from tailpipes (aka fossil-fueled powered vehicles), states like California have banned the sale of new gasoline vehicles by 2035. That means that an increasing number of Americans are going to be looking at EVs, PHEVs and hybrids for their next new car purchase. Yet, rentals make up roughly one-third of American housing, according to the U.S. Census and most of that housing stock is older, which means that in order to get access to at-home charging, landlords will have to be willing to invest to upgrade panels and provide charging access in multifamily garages. The average cost to upgrade a single family home’s electrical panel to handle charging a vehicle at home, can run between $1,300 and $3,000, or more. Add that into the high price of battery-electric, hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles and many people wont be able to afford or access home charging, especially those who live in multifamily buildings without access to home charging. That’s something that Tupper says Hyundai is taking into consideration, but he wasn’t able to share any concrete details around future plans. “If we want to achieve mass adoption, we need to solve that problem for renters and so we’re attacking it in a couple of different ways. First through our partnership with Electrify America. We’re working with them to incentivize to construction of as much charging infrastructure as possible and we’re trying to give it to customers for free,” Tupper told ZebethMedia. “We’re taking a strategic partnership approach and trying to identify the players right to offer, really a smattering of solutions. If there’s a city where, you know, we can help support the production or the development of charging hub, great. But if there’s a way for us to even incentivize low-power AC Charging. We’re going to take a look at that as well.” Tupper says that Hyundai is working with its partners like Electrum to bring more charging and power storage options to more customers in other states outside of the 16 that Electrum currently services, too. “We’re just starting out,” Tupper said, “Our guiding principles are that customers not only get the right products, but they also get the right products at the right price. Electrum helps us help the customer find the right solution on the marketplace, that way we’re actually able to deliver, usually a substantially better deal than something that they would normally just get by going to a local provider.”

Seven scaleups hog over 70% funding to Africa’s Solar PayGo ventures • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in africa, Climate, solarNo Comments

Over the last 10 years startups in Africa’s off-grid solar sector have attracted over $2.3 billion funding. However, the largest share of the financing has gone to just seven pay-as-you-go (PayGo) Africa-based scaleups, leaving hundreds others in the early-stage struggling to fundraise, according to the biennial Gogla-World Bank report. The seven most funded solar startups are Sun King, Zola Electric, M-Kopa, Bboxx, d.light, Engie Energy Access, and Lumos which, according to the Gogla Investment database, have attracted 72% of the sector’s equity, debt and grant financing while over 150 startups in the seed and phases accounted for the rest of the amount. In terms of equity funding, the scale-ups received investments worth $600 million, between 2015 and last year, as early-stage startups attracted $255 million VC funding over the same period. Overall, access to debt has not been easy for most early-stage startups in Africa especially since the Covid pandemic hit, yet the scaleups continue to unlock more debt funding amidst a similar operating environment. The aforementioned scaleups operate pay-go models that offer asset-based financing (pay-to-own) for solar kits and lanterns, products that are hugely popular in Sub-Saharan Africa where millions are off-grid, as national power grids remain underdeveloped. The lack of capital means that the early-stage startups are not able acquire assets like solar kits and lanterns, which are required to help them scale and capture more consumers and markets. Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda and Ghana, DRC are some of their major markets in Africa “Start-up companies report that accessing equity capital has been challenging, resulting in some being over leveraged, and others facing business difficulties. Lack of early-stage equity has resulted in the stifled growth of many companies,” “This is a barrier to the expansion of off-grid solar in new markets; as equity, grants, or output-based incentives, such as results-based financing, are generally best placed instruments for market expansion,” said Gogla, a global association for the off-grid solar energy industry, in the report. The trend is likely to continue as data on disclosed deals from the BigDeal database shows that so far this year, several of the seven scaleups accounted for most of the funding has been raised by the off-grid solar Paygo companies. A review of the data shows that nearly half a billion dollars in debt-equity funding has been raised by nearly 30 startups and scale-ups this year. Of the amount, $367 million is equity funding raised by 11 companies — including SunKing, M-Kopa and d.light which claimed 93% of the total equity amount. If we add d.light’s $50 million and Bboxx’s $35.5 million debt-funding, the four scale-ups so far account for 86% of the total funding raised by startups in Africa’s paygo solar sector. The ability of these companies to attract funding is attributable to their ability to capture huge markets across Africa, and by tapping syndicated loans. These companies, some of which offer financing for other assets, have also been quick to add new revenue streams further tapping and increasing their clientele base.