Greenlight: Building The Largest Rooftop Consumer Base In The Developing World

Via Nasdaq, an interesting article about a company bringing electricity to the developing world but – while so doing – building a portfolio of consumer rooftops:

Those of us who live in the developed world with all its conveniences would find it difficult to comprehend that about 1.2 billion people live every day without access to electricity. Of that 1.2 billion, about 600 million people who live “off the grid” are in Sub-Saharan Africa, where they spend billions of dollars every year lighting their homes with candles, kerosene and battery-powered lights.

Now an Indian-based company called Greenlight Planet wants to provide energy where it’s desperately needed, with the help of financing from a private equity firm, Fidelity Growth Partners in India. Their intention is to invest somewhere upwards of $28 billion to provide solar energy based products to the developing world.

One of the cofounders of Greenlight Planet, Anish Thakkar, told the news organization Spy Ghana that, “As a result of this financing we are building the largest rooftop consumer base in the developing world. We are investing especially to expand distribution in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Their goal is to service about 100 million homes by the year 2020. Greenlight Planet is an interesting company which started in 2007 and since then has expanded exponentially.

To me it is the type of company that in years past would have launched their operations from a Western country; instead they chose to make their headquarters in Mumbai. Investors wishing to know more about Greenlight Planet’s mission and operations would do well to check out their website at greenlightplanet.com.



This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2015 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.  You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.  You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 

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About This Blog And Its Author
As potential uses for building and parking lot roofspace continue to grow, unique opportunities to understand and profit from this trend will emerge. Roof Options is committed to tracking the evolving uses of roof estate – spanning solar power, rainwater harvesting, wind power, gardens & farms, “cooling” sites, advertising, apiculture, and telecom transmission platforms – to help unlock the nascent, complex, and expanding roofspace asset class.

Educated at Yale University (Bachelor of Arts - History) and Harvard (Master in Public Policy - International Development), Monty Simus has held a lifelong interest in environmental and conservation issues, primarily as they relate to freshwater scarcity, renewable energy, and national park policy. Working from a water-scarce base in Las Vegas with his wife and son, he is the founder of Water Politics, an organization dedicated to the identification and analysis of geopolitical water issues arising from the world’s growing and vast water deficits, and is also a co-founder of SmartMarkets, an eco-preneurial venture that applies web 2.0 technology and online social networking innovations to motivate energy & water conservation. He previously worked for an independent power producer in Central Asia; co-authored an article appearing in the Summer 2010 issue of the Tulane Environmental Law Journal, titled: “The Water Ethic: The Inexorable Birth Of A Certain Alienable Right”; and authored an article appearing in the inaugural issue of Johns Hopkins University's Global Water Magazine in July 2010 titled: “H2Own: The Water Ethic and an Equitable Market for the Exchange of Individual Water Efficiency Credits.”