Commercial And Industrial Solar Green Bond
Fast Growing, Cheaper and Reliable
Solar is the future of energy for African and Asian countries, which also have the highest solar irradiance. The distributed solar market is expected to add a capacity of 315 GW in the next 5 years, which is a 2.3x increase from the previous five years. 70% of this increase is expected to come from Commercial and Industrial (C&I) solar. C&I solar is generally is 20-30% cheaper than the grid and is more reliable. As a private sector effort, C&I solar is nimbler and has fewer regulatory constraints than grid projects.
SIMA’s C&I Green Bond
The core objective of the SIMA C&I Solar Green Bond is to help create and grow a new class of SMEs who are engaged in the C&I solar sector by providing packaged and customized financing to these SME developers, both for their corporate needs such as working capital, inventory financing, construction/bridge financing and longer term project financing requirements. The ambition is to show a path that will allow new channels of financing to open for this important segment which is complementary to mini-grids and the off-grid space.
The Bond will be financing projects in the Productive Use Sector including Agriculture, Agro-processing, Education, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Services and Hospitality which are 5 MW in size or lesser.
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and Impact
We will use an ESG numeric scorecard as an incremental implementation tool that is clear and measurable across the portfolio. We will strive to engage the developers in improving their compliance by offering technical assistance to strengthen their ESG practices. In other words, we are trying to create a sub-sector in the C&I space with deep implications for the industry.
SIMA will measure the impact created a) capacity of solar energy the bond helps establish b) number of companies helped to scale business c) CO2 emissions avoided d) Number of liters of diesel replaced by use of solar energy and e) employment generated by helping build scale.
Contact Us
If you are interested in availing debt facilities from the C&I Solar Green Bond, please click here to apply!