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candi solar

Debt : July 2024

BIO has granted a USD 9M loan to candi solar, a company installing, owning and operating solar production plants and selling electricity to clients in India and South Africa.

Amount

$ 9,000,000.00

Type of investment

Debt

Development impacts

  • Local economic growth
  • Fight against climate change

Beneficiary locations

Africa: South Africa
Asia: India

Investment field

Infrastructure

Activity

DD.35.113  Production of electricity: solar

Organisation

candi solar

Domicile

Netherlands

More investments in

candi solar

  • Debt € 6,180,468.00 (2023)
  • Subsidy € 15,203.00 (2022-2022)
  • Debt € 4,074,650.00 (2021)

candi’s core strategy is to serve SMEs that need reliable and affordable energy but prefer to focus their resources on their core business and outsource the financing and management of a solar plant.

Solar plants are generally installed on rooftops and have an average size of 1.1MW in India (3/4 of portfolio) and 585kW in SA (1/4).To unlock this market overlooked by most players, candi aims to reach high volumes, compress transaction costs, leverage its fundraising expertise and rely on state-of-the-art proprietary credit analysis and monitoring tools to minimize risks.

Development impacts

  • Local economic growth

    Increase access to renewable energy for SME clients in India and South Africa where grids are exposed to instability – through solar panel solutions that are more reliable and at a fixed and lower price, thereby reducing uncertainty of grid price evolution, contributing to render green energy financially sustainable, and ultimately fostering local economic growth.

  • Fight against climate change

    Funding an increase of the renewable energy capacity in the target countries and reduce client-SMEs energy dependency on the national (mostly fossil fuels-based i.e. coal and oil) grids, increasing the share of RE in the energy mix and avoiding an extra ~107,070 tCO2 per year.

E&S Impact

BIO and candi agreed to strengthen the company’s E&S practices via an additional effort in terms of formalisation, data collection and recording system. candi will hire a junior ESG person to support this change. In parallel, candi will develop an end-of-life strategy for when panels are decommissioned, and will formalize its land acquisition procedure for wheeling projects

Situation at the time of investment

candi has a comprehensive set of policies and procedures in place, implemented by a team of three people. candi verifies the alignment of off-takers' activity with the EDFI exclusion list and verifies that EPC contractors adopt the required OHS practices to avoid safety hazards. Finally, candi keeps track of its PV suppliers via a semestrial risk mapping exercise

Risk Category: B+

Read impact and news about this project

Investment in candi solar

News

Investment in candi solar

22-02-2022

responsAbility Investments, the Swiss impact investment manager, and BIO, the Belgian Investment Company for Developing Countries, have provided a USD 10 million equivalent multi-currency loan to candi solar, a visionary financial and clean energy platform through which distributed energy infrastructure in emerging markets can be built at scale.

Read more

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