The hubs
An agri-value energy hub is a solar-powered rural center built around the agricultural economy of its district. Select any module to see what it does, who pays for it and which partner carries it.
Solar core
Solar photovoltaic generation with battery storage, sized for the daytime productive load, engineered for a twenty-five-year life and grid-ready by design.
Photographs show the class of equipment and service, from projects across Africa; they are not PURE Power sites unless the caption says so. Image credits.
Milling, pressing, drying, packing — the first service rural households pay for.
Hammer and rice mills, oil presses, dryers and packing lines arrive with the hub. Value addition moves back to the village: flour instead of grain, oil instead of seed, graded and dried produce instead of a distress sale at harvest.
Walk-in cold rooms that turn a perishable harvest into a sellable one.
Solar cold rooms hold vegetables, fruit, fish and dairy through price troughs and to market days. Cold chain opens higher-value buyers — supermarkets, processors, exporters — that a warm truck can never reach.
Photographs of this module are added as the first hubs are commissioned.
Solar pumping, filtration and low-lift irrigation as a community service.
Safe drinking water at the hub water point and filters sold through the counter; solar pumping for cooperative plots and marsh-edge rice that extends the cropping season and buffers rain-fed farming against drought.
Sold, financed and serviced at the hub, for the life of the product.
Certified solar home systems, appliances and clean cookstoves — briquette and electric — with enrollment, pay-as-you-go collection, spare parts and a permanently staffed counter. Aftercare is the product: repair, replacement, reconditioning and e-waste handled for years, not to the point of sale.
Hub-charged two- and three-wheelers: produce out, residues back.
Electric motorcycles and tricycles charge on hub solar during the day. Outbound they carry produce to market, solar systems, stoves, filters, medicines and repaired goods to the villages. Inbound they bring crop residues and manure to the aggregation site, samples to the clinic and items to the workshop. Every electric kilometer displaces imported fuel.
Residues in; briquettes, biogas and organic fertilizer out.
Agricultural and animal residues collected on the return leg are pressed into briquettes and digested into biogas at aggregation sites, and return to the villages as cooking fuel at about half the price of charcoal, storable fuel for on-demand power, and fertilizer and biochar for the fields. The recurring cooking input is made domestically from local waste — no imported-fuel exposure in a currency crisis.
Satellite connectivity, accredited courses, train-the-trainers.
A business center with satellite connectivity where rural learners get online. Accredited programs with national and international universities are tailored to the district's economy so knowledge converts to skills that pay locally. Three tracks: hub operation and maintenance; agricultural best practice for dissemination through cooperatives; and solar installation and maintenance as a transferable trade.
Remote consultation, vaccine-grade refrigeration, vision screening and glasses.
Maternal and child health by remote consultation and referral, with vaccine-grade refrigeration on hub power. Last-mile agents trained in basic care carry measurement devices and AI-assisted triage to the villages, take samples and readings back to the hub, and deliver medicines and glasses on the return route. Catching a child's refractive error early is among the most cost-effective interventions in global health.
Payments, savings and credit where the district already comes to work.
A banking counter with domestic banks and microfinance partners. The hub's metered consumption, processing throughput and payment records give a lender a live view of which enterprises are performing; produce held and processed at the hub can be lent against; repayment is collected where revenue is earned. Cooperatives are the counterpart for collective bargaining and aggregation.
Credit at the hub: produce as collateral, collection at source
Cooperatives, agri-SMEs and youth- and women-led businesses built on hub services.
Enterprise bays, mentors and the network member's incubation methodology turn hub services into businesses: a miller, a cold-chain trader, a solar technician, an e-mobility operator. Usage, sales and payment data make each emerging business legible to lenders and early-stage investors — rare in frontier markets, standard at a hub.
Aftercare that escalates: agent, hub counter, central depot.
A workshop and spares stock at every anchor hub, with senior technicians and the main repair center at the technical base. Every installation and service visit is recorded geospatially, so any unit sold can be found, serviced, warranted and reported on years later — the condition of credible results-based and carbon reporting.
Distribution follows measured demand and payment discipline.
The hub is a precursor to a mini-grid, not a substitute. Load, revenue record and collections are established first; distribution is built where measured demand clears a viability gate, or sooner where a government, utility or funder wants to move faster. Generation can be scaled and sold to commercial and industrial offtakers under direct power purchase agreements. Every tier is built grid-ready, with interconnection provision costed in and transfer values set by a published formula.
Equipment sets are configured to the crops and volumes of the district, not to a fixed template. Figures are indicative.
State or provincial level
≈400 kWp solar with storage
Heavy processing lines, cold rooms, a workshop, a spares depot and a training wing. The technical base of a cluster.
District level
≈120 kWp
Milling, oil press, dryer, cold room, workshop, points of sale, connectivity and the banking counter.
Cluster level
≈35 kWp
Milling, a chiller, a retail and after-sales point, charging — the services kiosk of a village cluster.
kWp is kilowatts of peak solar capacity.
One route, many revenue lines. The same trip earns in both directions.
Locally recruited agents cover the near villages on foot and the far ones by hub-charged electric two-wheelers. Remoteness does not decide who is served.
Every element is a fundable unit — a hub, a cluster, a mini-grid, a country wheel, a training cohort. Each closes on its own gate; a delay in one never halts the others. Go small, go big: like telecom, no waiting for the grid. The economics are in the logistics and in spreading fixed costs across the network.
This is why so many mini-grids died at handover: a village-scale site cannot carry engineering, importation, warranties, legal and accounting alone. In the network those sit at continental and country level, and each hub adds services at near-marginal cost.
Solar core
Solar photovoltaic generation with battery storage, sized for the daytime productive load, engineered for a twenty-five-year life and grid-ready by design.
Milling, pressing, drying, packing — the first service rural households pay for.
Hammer and rice mills, oil presses, dryers and packing lines arrive with the hub. Value addition moves back to the village: flour instead of grain, oil instead of seed, graded and dried produce instead of a distress sale at harvest.
Walk-in cold rooms that turn a perishable harvest into a sellable one.
Solar cold rooms hold vegetables, fruit, fish and dairy through price troughs and to market days. Cold chain opens higher-value buyers — supermarkets, processors, exporters — that a warm truck can never reach.
Photographs of this module are added as the first hubs are commissioned.
Read moreSolar pumping, filtration and low-lift irrigation as a community service.
Safe drinking water at the hub water point and filters sold through the counter; solar pumping for cooperative plots and marsh-edge rice that extends the cropping season and buffers rain-fed farming against drought.
Sold, financed and serviced at the hub, for the life of the product.
Certified solar home systems, appliances and clean cookstoves — briquette and electric — with enrollment, pay-as-you-go collection, spare parts and a permanently staffed counter. Aftercare is the product: repair, replacement, reconditioning and e-waste handled for years, not to the point of sale.
Hub-charged two- and three-wheelers: produce out, residues back.
Electric motorcycles and tricycles charge on hub solar during the day. Outbound they carry produce to market, solar systems, stoves, filters, medicines and repaired goods to the villages. Inbound they bring crop residues and manure to the aggregation site, samples to the clinic and items to the workshop. Every electric kilometer displaces imported fuel.
Residues in; briquettes, biogas and organic fertilizer out.
Agricultural and animal residues collected on the return leg are pressed into briquettes and digested into biogas at aggregation sites, and return to the villages as cooking fuel at about half the price of charcoal, storable fuel for on-demand power, and fertilizer and biochar for the fields. The recurring cooking input is made domestically from local waste — no imported-fuel exposure in a currency crisis.
Satellite connectivity, accredited courses, train-the-trainers.
A business center with satellite connectivity where rural learners get online. Accredited programs with national and international universities are tailored to the district's economy so knowledge converts to skills that pay locally. Three tracks: hub operation and maintenance; agricultural best practice for dissemination through cooperatives; and solar installation and maintenance as a transferable trade.
Remote consultation, vaccine-grade refrigeration, vision screening and glasses.
Maternal and child health by remote consultation and referral, with vaccine-grade refrigeration on hub power. Last-mile agents trained in basic care carry measurement devices and AI-assisted triage to the villages, take samples and readings back to the hub, and deliver medicines and glasses on the return route. Catching a child's refractive error early is among the most cost-effective interventions in global health.
Payments, savings and credit where the district already comes to work.
A banking counter with domestic banks and microfinance partners. The hub's metered consumption, processing throughput and payment records give a lender a live view of which enterprises are performing; produce held and processed at the hub can be lent against; repayment is collected where revenue is earned. Cooperatives are the counterpart for collective bargaining and aggregation.
Cooperatives, agri-SMEs and youth- and women-led businesses built on hub services.
Enterprise bays, mentors and the network member's incubation methodology turn hub services into businesses: a miller, a cold-chain trader, a solar technician, an e-mobility operator. Usage, sales and payment data make each emerging business legible to lenders and early-stage investors — rare in frontier markets, standard at a hub.
Aftercare that escalates: agent, hub counter, central depot.
A workshop and spares stock at every anchor hub, with senior technicians and the main repair center at the technical base. Every installation and service visit is recorded geospatially, so any unit sold can be found, serviced, warranted and reported on years later — the condition of credible results-based and carbon reporting.
Distribution follows measured demand and payment discipline.
The hub is a precursor to a mini-grid, not a substitute. Load, revenue record and collections are established first; distribution is built where measured demand clears a viability gate, or sooner where a government, utility or funder wants to move faster. Generation can be scaled and sold to commercial and industrial offtakers under direct power purchase agreements. Every tier is built grid-ready, with interconnection provision costed in and transfer values set by a published formula.