Sun Exchange Video Diary #50
The 50th episode of Sun Exchange Video Diaries is here!
Now released on a quarterly basis, these video blogs take you behind the scenes, giving you the latest on Sun Exchange solar cell installations, community energy production, industry news and much more!
In this episode:
Welcome to our fiftieth episode of Sun Exchange Video Diaries. This is the place to come to get an insight into all things Sun Exchange. Things are on track for the first phase of solar powering the Nhimbe Fresh cold store facilities. The equipment is en route and arriving in Zimbabwe as we speak. We hope that the system will be generating electricity as early as the end of August. Congratulations to all of you and thank you for your patience as we get this fantastic project rolled out.
Sun Exchange visited Zimbabwe this quarter to check on progress. We also took the opportunity to scope out the next phase of Nhimbe Fresh’s project, which is to solar power their water pump operations. Being a farm, getting water from reservoirs to where the crops are is vital to the operations and that is what the next phase is all about. To get involved in the next phase of Nhimbe Fresh, keep an eye out on our solar projects page.
In this last quarter, we have completed five solar crowdsales including a retail centre, three schools and one retirement home. This is all thanks to you, the Sun Exchange community. Quick tip: if you want to keep track of installation progress you can do so by checking out the appropriate fields on your Sun Exchange dashboard. Seven solar plants have gone live over the past quarter. Those of you who are solar powering those projects, you will be pleased to see income accumulating in your wallets. For some of those projects, that is actually early energy. This is bonus income to you prior to the 20 year lease. Congrats to everyone involved in those projects.
Collectively, the Sun Exchange community has generated 5.5 GWh of clean, affordable solar energy. That is enough electricity to charge 692 million smartphones. That’s a lot of energy! By generating that much energy the community has offset carbon emissions equivalent to planting 94,000 trees. Now that is one big forest!
We’ve just passed the winter solstice here in South Africa, the shortest day of the year. This means the days are getting longer and you will be earning more income from your solar panels. The winter solstice is also the marking point we use to recognize Sun Exchange's birthday. We celebrated our sixth year of operating. We could not be doing this without you. Thank you all for joining us on our mission to connect the world to the sun and here’s to many more years of doing so. Happy birthday Sun Exchange!
In between these episodes of SUNEX Diaries, we are now running a series of community calls. This quarter, we held a special community call with our charity partner, Africa Parks. If you missed that episode, you can rewatch it through our blog and our YouTube channel. We highly recommend you stay tuned to our social media because these community calls go out live and you can take part!
So that’s it for this episode -- it was short and sweet. Thank you all for being part of this platform. Do share this video on your social media and if you’re not yet signed up, do so now. We’ll see you all soon.