‘SOLshare’ – Community based solar power grid that is decentralized to meet energy supply needs for remote locations.

Pioneer of Renewable Energy-based Peer-to-Peer Trading Platforms

SOLshare has successfully piloted the world’s first ICT-enabled peer-to-peer electricity trading network for rural households with and without solar home systems in Shariatpur, Bangladesh.

SOLshare has created a revolutionary new approach to bring affordable solar electricity to everyone in Bangladesh and beyond. It believes that smart peer to peer grids can be the future for energy utilities globally.

The trading network interconnects households via a low-voltage DC grid and controls power flows through bi-directional metering integrated with an ICT backend; handling payment, customer service and remote monitoring. Each SOLshare meter enables the user to buy and sell renewable electricity with neighboring households, businesses and rural industries.

SOLshare came up with a way for people to turn their excess solar electricity into money with zero hassle. It also enables them to purchase more power on the go whenever they want as well as they get to invest in more power generation and trade it off for a handsome return with minimal risk. This led us to install the world’s first cyber-physical peer-to-peer (P2P) solar sharing grids, and this of all places in remote areas of Bangladesh.

SOLshare has developed SOLbazaar, an IoT-driven trading platform which enables people to trade the excess solar energy generated by solar home systems. Consider the SOLbazaar as a dynamic energy marketplace where SHS-users (Solar Home System users) come to sell their excess energy to non-SHS-users, or people who can’t, unfortunately, afford a SHS for that matter. One party earns money, the other party finally gets access to affordable electricity. The energy sellers can also choose to keep the excess energy to themselves and rather utilize it to run extra appliances like a TV, fridge, or computer.

Along with its implementation partner, the NGO UBOMUS, its financing partner IDCOL and research partner United International Universit-Centre for Energy Research, SOLshare combines solar home systems and centralized mini-grids to enable more rural households to access renewable electricity at a lower cost.

It’s Mission – Create a network. Share electricity.

It’s Vision -It believes that it’s smart peer to peer grids can be the future for energy utilities globally.

People in rural Bangladesh are now earning additional income by selling their surplus electricity and at the same time, new users have gained access to electricity for the first time in their life – without any large, centralized grid.

The SOLbazaar stands on its three pillars: the SOLbox, the SOLapp, and the SOLweb. SOLbox is a bi-directional DC electricity meter that enables peer-to-peer electricity trading, smart grid management, remote monitoring, mobile money payment and data analytics. The SOLbox enables the creation of a DC smart grid, integrating with existing hardware, such as a solar home system or battery and connecting this through the SOLbox with other SOLboxes in nearby homes or businesses.

The SOLapp manages customer portfolios taking user information and payment details into account. It updates accordingly with user activities and energy consumption. The information from these two pillars are then passed onto the third pillar, the SOLweb, where all the information is gathered and analyzed to understand system paradigms and irregularities..

  • Trading renewable electricity through a SOLshare village grid can unlock at least up to 30% excess generation capacity of existing solar home systems.  Through usage of the full power generation capacity, more people benefit from a clean, reliable source of electricity at a low cost.
  • The SOLshare electricity trading platform turns the purchase of a solar home system into an investment with a return, enabling users to leverage excess generation from their solar home system and sell this to neighboring households, reducing the annual cost of energy access by at least 25%.
  • SOLshare expects to operate more than 20,000 nanogrids by the end of 2030, which are expected to supply more than 1,000,000 customers in Bangladesh, including interconnecting them to the national grid through a single point of common coupling.

The SOLboxSOLapp and SOLweb together form the SOLbazaar, enabling one house to smoothly connect to another, eventually connecting to ten houses which then connect to hundreds of households- all possible due to the sharing nature of our trading platform. As the SOLshare network grows, it can connect with the national grid, operating in island mode when the grid is unavailable, and drawing power from the grid when it is available.