AAAS develops, finances, build and operates solar parks in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our basis is Solar but we connect all kind of power sources. We service a wide variety of clients, from mines, schools, manufacturing plants to remote African farms. The challenging environment has made us well-equiped to operate throughout African countries.
The combined strength of our team and worldwide network in the high-tech industry, financial services and legal services gives us the ability to provide our clients cutting edge solutions to ensure seamless operation whilst cutting back on costs.
Vision
Worldwide there is an energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. In Emerging areas like Africa and Asia there is no infrastructure and in stead of speaking of a transition these countries have the opportunity to directly introduce renewable energy. AAAS focusses on these regions where there is no infrastructure and where we can directly deliver to companies, co-operations of institutions like universities or factories.
There is a growing interest in developing smaller size solar parks in Africa. Africa Solar Outlook 2021 and Solar for Business in Sub-Saharan Africa are two pivotal reports that give a good insight in the development of the solar market in Africa.
In short there are three major drivers for the growing demand of C&I projects in Africa:
More and more C&I (commercial and industrial sector) end-users are now fully understanding the benefits of going solar
C&I end-users understand the benefits of solar energy: cheaper and more reliable electricity to run their business. Until now, the wide majority of these C&I projects has been delivered on a CAPEX basis, meaning that the end-user has had to pay the full amount upfront for the solar installation. This has definitely limited the number of projects that have been built so far as only a small percentage of companies possesses the required cash to make such an upfront investment.
The international investment community has understood the opportunity as well and has developed a growing appetite for investments in C&I projects in Africa
African C&I projects are indeed considered as attractive investment opportunities as they are based on B2B negotiations (as opposed to B2G), they can be conducted and successfully closed quickly (faster than the lengthy government tenders) and they can offer interesting IRRs (as opposed to international tenders for large-scale projects where the international competition pushes IRR expectations to their lowest limits). For all these reasons, C&I opportunities are generally considered as good and attractive deals. But their scattered nature and significantly lower ticket size per project may play against them from an investor’s point of view.
The challenge with financed C&I is to generate large enough portfolios of projects to attract investment partners
No matter how good the project is, it can be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to finance a single project because investors are looking for scale and being able to deploy large ticket sizes. This is now growingly made possible thanks to C&I development companies that collect and finance
Partners
We are not doing this alone, to be able to deliver around the world we work with a select number of partners.
Our strategic Partner is Soventix. Soventix builds, operates and services the installations. Soventix is building solar parks for more than 15 years in Africa and South America and have offices around the world.
