Hi guys, we caught up with Victor Alagbe of OneWattSolar, to understand what OneWattSolar is trying to do for the power aspect of Nigeria via blockchain and Solar .
Can We Meet You (Brief Introduction)
We would prefer that this focus more on OneWattSolar than myself. By the way of introduction, I work with existing and emergent companies to create actionable strategies for leveraging Blockchain technology to build the future across a wide variety of brands, industries, and markets.
I have built core competencies in understanding Blockchain technology, the depth of its current applications, and disruptive potential it has to trigger paradigm shifts across markets, industries and economies.
OneWattSolar is inspired from the realization that access to funding has consistently proven to be a hindrance to the adoption of solar energy in sub-Saharan Africa. People don’t have enough funds to commit to an outright purchase of Solar Home Systems that could power their homes and small businesses. People who have such funds are skeptical about making the investments because they are not convinced about the reliability of solar energy.
OneWattSolar de-risks the adoption of solar energy for our customers by providing them with solar home systems without requiring them to buy outrightly or pay for the system over instalments. We also take care of the maintenance of the systems.
OneWattSolar is powered by the One Watt Token (OWT). Our token generation event will happen before the end of this year.
Quite a number of people are familiar with Bitcoin – at least for speculative purposes. OWT is however a utility token that provides access to the solar energy that our systems generate. We have plans in place to educate our customers on how to purchase electricity with OWT. We are also in talks with some players in the financial services sector to create a seamless collections process.
Nope. We are offering Energy-As-A-Service. The customers won’t pay for the SHS system. The customers only sign a Power Purchase Agreement that enables them to use the energy generated by the SHS.
Our immediate target is to roll out the first 1000 installations in Q1, 2019. We are confident that we will reach our goal to roll out 1 million systems over the next five years.
The initial pushback from stakeholders who don’t find it easy to make a distinction between Bitcoin and the underlying Blockchain technology. OneWattSolar is a blockchain-powered project; there’s more to Blockchain than Bitcoin.
We would say we have seen positively warm reception to Blockchain technology, its applications, and how its decentralized nature could solve some of the biggest systemic problems in the continent. Breaking out into the mass-market adoption of Blockchain technology is still a work in progress all over the world. Projects such as OneWattSolar are pushing the frontiers of disruption towards a faster adoption of Blockchain technology.
We are leveraging Blockchain to fix the energy deficit in the country. Many smart minds are working on interesting Blockchain solutions to solve some of our biggest challengesfacing the country across different industries. Wherever there’s a systemic problem due to centralization; blockchain technology allows us to change the narrative with decentralization.
The understanding that thing might be difficult, but they are seldom impossible. We have a committed team working practically round the clock to make solar energy accessible; we are each other’s motivators.
